


and the truth became a tool

by Sharkchimedes



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hraxian Kraglin, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Mutiny Kraglin should probably see a therapist, a lot of headcanons and backstory speculation, attempted poisioning, canon typical cussing, goes from pre-canon to post GOTG Vol.2, i came to write for my favorite characters not to be scientifically accurate, i love these awful space pirates, martinex is also technically in it but he doesnt actually speak unforunately, mostly anyway, ocs are a couple of family members for Kraglin and the Hrax scenes, there is a revolution against the Nova in here, unrealistic depictions of terraforming and planetary reclaimation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 18:12:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16289408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharkchimedes/pseuds/Sharkchimedes
Summary: ... that I held in my handAnd I knew it did not understand" - The Truth is a Cave (The Oh Hellos)Kraglin has had a long, fairly riveting life. It starts and nearly ends on a smog-filled place called Hrax, and the rest is spent between the stars.





	and the truth became a tool

**Author's Note:**

> i never expected to actually write a 26k word fic but here we are and i did it in a week and a half. this originally was just supposed to be the post canon scenes and then spiraled wildly out of control. this is 26k words of pure, unadulterated self indulgence lads.
> 
> this the hraxian kraglin au i believe was started by write-like-an-american over on tumblr! enjoy.

Hrax was a shitty place to grow up. It was, even before the Nova came and turned the whole planet into the smudged, grey-and-rust-grunge shitshow that it was now. 

Once, it had been a hot and humid half-forested nightmare full of things that wanted to kill you, half terraced holes that dug miles beneath the surface, connected by a mess of dead-end tunnels and crawlspaces that put Sakaarian city planning to shame and spoke of either desperation on the part of the ancestral burrowers or serious inebriation.  

Personally, given what Kraglin knew about their history, he was betting on it mostly being the latter. Not that he gave much of a shit. Who was he to judge?

It was sometime a few hundred years ago- or just several generations, who flarking knew anymore- that Nova had come and waltzed into the place. Hrax wasn’t a complete backwater with no idea of spacers, but it hadn’t by any means been a port planet. Hraxians had a strong pack mentality and bonding instincts, ones that had meant that for years that regardless of Hrax being a shithole, people didn’t bother moving on.

People still didn’t move on after the sky turned charcoal and oppressive in a way that had nothing to do with humidity, because as it turned out, Hraxians were pretty impervious to most things that ought to kill a sentient being. Drops from heights, poison, a near-deadly cocktail of gases and ash. Maybe that was part of why Nova had mostly locked the planet down and made the two sentence registry on Hraxians in the official records “Pest species; Dangerous.”

Sure they had two rows more teeth than most folks, and could digest near anything, but when _your_ planet had been trying to kill you long before the bureaucrats decided you wouldn’t mind strip mining and processing the whole damn thing and that you all surely wouldn’t mind that sort of honest work, you’d want to have that too.

So. Hrax was a planet of scorched and grimy metal, equally scorched and grimy Hraxians, and the shiny Nova with their breathers shoved in their mouths and goggles over their eyes to protect them from ash.

Kraglin Obfonteri didn’t know or care to know much more about their history than that. History these days was all in the present tense, as in remembering where you were goin’ at that moment and where the Nova patrols came through and when, and what footholds had held up for years when you needed to get away, and which would probably crumble based on the stress dips in the metal.

Personal history was only slightly less unimportant. He’d been born what _Leanar_ said was about ten years back, and about three years that, along had come Jaeglin, and then their parents were outta the picture. Either they’d been crushed in a mining operation or run off to another sector of the metal slimeball they were all crawling around on, and he didn’t really care which. Pack bonds were funny that way- easily broken soon as you forgot what a person smelt like.

Jae had just cut his second row of teeth in the last week, and that made him extra insufferable than normal. It’d taken Kraglin about all of his earliest sentient memories to realize that despite being a kid himself, he didn’t like them. That probably revealed some greater truth about how on Hrax, kids were both necessary and dead weight to lug at the same time, something that resulted in both numerous kids per pack group and packs of just kids further out in the slumtowns, and either way kept their population from crashing down like a rot soaked tunnel.

But regardless, Jae was a little shit of a pest.

Being the oldest, Kraglin was technically the superior sibling in more ways than one. Unless you were somehow off real nice, the rest of the kids past the oldest knew they were auxiliary, just around in case one of those oh-so-common accidents struck and took out the next one up. If something minor happened, the next poor sap down the line might lose a few liters of blood or a inconsequential organ if someone with some kind of medical sense happened to be around when it happened. That was part of why usual naming schemes dictated that the youngers would have the last bit the same as the olders. You could cut them all down to nicknames, o’ course, but only the eldest ever got the dignity of a full name unless they lasted past childhood.

But being as it was they were the _only_ two members of the Obfonteri line this side of average age, it was unusually important they both last. The whole industrial takeover of Hrax had broken apart the older pack structures and set bloodline against bloodline, so if one of the three died off, then the other two were pretty much good as rot themselves, unless the other two seriously stepped up.

Back in the day, when their cities were actually separated by more than a chalk-paint line across a corrugated floor, folks weren’t as pitted against one another to survive. The common enemy was the planet, and that brought together packs that then pitted against each other and the forests.

These days, the common enemy was probably the Nova, but the practical enemy was the neighbor across the way that’d be more than happy to steal your food and assimilate your measly 20 squared into their own space. Nova would shoot you dead or haul your ass off planet to flark knows where, but they were also concerned with getting themselves dirty. Other Hraxians? Nah.

So Kraglin had to drag the little brat along with him when he went out. There wasn’t a whole lot that a 10-something could do besides skim and scavenge, especially with a blue-mouthed pup along for the ride. They’d perch in the darkened areas of alleys, Kraglin sharpening the makeshift knives he would trade off to others who couldn’t quite meet the requirements for even the illegal jobs, and bolt off every so often when something resembling a score got spotted.

He _attempted_ to knock some of this sense into Jae’s head, but so far, it hadn’t really seemed to have stuck.

All in all, it was just a cycle of days marked by of smog-rat and found teeth punched out in the earlier hours. Smog-rat wasn’t good for much more than soaking in what water allowance was sent to their block, but teeth could be pawned off to dealers. Kraglin usually tried to get a boots worth before he would make the long trek down the slope to the pits for that, but given the way Jae was starting to grow again now that his teeth had finally decided to show, it’d probably need to be sooner.

_Leanar_ said other sentients didn’t have their pups out and hunting their own meals and scores, and that she was proud of him. Kraglin had scoffed and said other sentients seemed pretty stupid, seeing as whatever the Nova were couldn’t even breath in the atmo they’d made. But deep down, he’d gotten the same warm slip of something that felt like the rare time _Leanar_ had gone out and gotten them something bought from somewhere else to eat.

That’d been about the time she’d also told him that there were a lot more different sentients out there, and that Nova weren’t no species, but an incorporation. Most of the Nova, were the same species- _Xandarian_ \- but they were a pretty mix. There were apparently other big alliances and groups too. He’d asked if they, Hraxians who had been just fine without all this “efficient resource access”, had wanted to be incorporated.

It’d been a rhetorical question.

_Leanar_ herself had used to work in one of the few remaining pit mines, til a cave in caught part of her leg. It had made her walk a little funny and she couldn’t twist it the way you had to if you wanted to get around in the tight and dark, but it wasn’t anything near what was needed to justify a mercy. So _Leanar_ guarded their shitty little hole in the wall home and watched Jae when Kraglin had to go too far, and did all the things their packmates would’ve split up till she could start teaching him.

And that was just life on Hrax.

\---

It was when Jae hit ten himself that the trouble started.

It wasn't exactly a secret that the Nova Core weren’t exactly _liked_ on Hrax. They were pretty much the end of every joke told, and when you saw one on the street, you’d sneer to yourself _breather_ , because Hraxians took to the soupy air like anything else and didn’t need technology just to keep their body going.

So it wasn’t really a surprise either when resistances cropped up every now and again. They didn’t last long, usually, as the Nova would turn them on each other or just drag them off planet. But as the years went on, and it became more and more consciously obvious that things were going stagnant- and now, it wasn’t even the planet itself, but the Nova’s own wars coming back to bite ‘em-and that there were openings and weak points. Hrax was both an “easy” outpost and the kind of place corpsmen got sent to as punishment. 

That was probably why this particular movement was still going, and had spread among more than one sector now. Kraglin wasn’t sure what he thought of it, beyond the fact it changed some of his safe ways back home, and that somehow Jae’d heard about it. With Jae being ten now and having finally lost all the milk teeth in the front row and had the third and final one move up to “usable in a pinch” in the back, he didn’t need watching all the time anymore.

So Kraglin had pretty much told him to fuck off and leave him alone most days, so he could actually grab a few of the not-so-legal jobs that he could handle without worrying about Jae. It was pretty much thievery and sneaking around behind backs, and the occasional use for a knife.

Which was how it came that one day, Kraglin ran across Jae in the middle of a whole nest of trouble. Curfew had been called early, klaxons going off with a painful, piercing roar in the distance, and he’d been booking it back home with his scores for the day.

Only to run into the source of the lockdown.

Turned out that this day, some of the rebels had decided to do the fool thing and attempt to take over one of the warehouses still containing ore in their sector, which had gone wrong, and it seemed they were scaring all the locals back inside to catch anyone running farther out.

And, as Kraglin went to check the wall nearest to him for handholds so he could _get the flark outta there_ , he caught a familiar looking kid in the corner of his eye and ran for him instead, yanking Jae behind him and into an alley. “The _flark_ you doing out here, Jae?!”

Jae, to his measly amount of credit, had the decency to look scared for a moment before he started arguing. “We have to do something! I was just helping them get in is all-”

“Yer _ten_ and barely old enough to take jobs anyway-”

“Says _you_!”

It was about that point Kraglin realized that the streets around them were getting nothing but quieter beyond the distant roaring, and he clapped a hand over Jae’s mouth. “Jae, I swear, if you don’t do exactly as I’m about to say, I’m gonna knock out your teeth and use ‘em to buy a new knife!”

Now Jae was quiet, and looked actually scared. Kraglin shoved him the other way. “You run past the old junker shop and scramble up like I showed you, and you get your ass on that roof and park it till you can go down the shaft to _Leanar._ Got it?”

Jae gave a teeny nod and Kraglin shoved him back, watching him bolt. Kid was never gonna make it, he was small for his age and he could see the nerves creeping in.

One thing for it, then.

Kraglin turned when he heard boots stomping and the noise of breathers, threw himself into a roll out of the alley, and threw a knife into a corpsman’s ankle.

 

  
Turned out where all them Hraxians got taken away to was a mining colony. If Kraglin hadn’t still been busy being furious at Jae, he’d have found a bitter irony in that. 

That damn kid better keep his nose were it belonged. Brat wouldn’t last a week out here. Kraglin only lasted because he knew knives enough to defend himself and was still small enough at fourteen to get into places the grown couldn’t. Jae was small and stupid and lacked the basics of self preservation instincts, if that warehouse was any proof. _Leanar_ better chew the kid right out.

Somewhere, a sour lump pulled at his throat. _Leanar_ wouldn’t be busy getting mad at Jae. They’d be busy cracking open the first of his shed and knocked out teeth, and murmuring whatever send-away tune _Leanar_ wanted for the last of the eldest in the clan. Jae’d have to step up if they were gonna make it. _Leanar_ ’s foot had gotten real bad in the last year or so, some new something the Nova had shaken loose in the pipes with the new tunnels. 

There’d been words once, for an exile from their pack. One for one stolen away from it.

But they were as lost to Hrax as he was.

\---

At fifteen, Kraglin finds out in a close and personal viewing what someone’s organs look like when they’ve been shredded with a knife. It’s extremely close and personal because he’s the one that does it. It was mostly a fear response, because they’d gotten _way_ too close to him and defense instincts had kicked in.

Things continue on much the same from there. Apparently, the Nova don’t really care what the Hraxians do to each other when they’re inside, so long as they _stay_ inside. It’s not even really a concern, since anyone who’s gonna act out or be stupid gets offed pretty soon as they act on it anyway.

Kraglin begrudgingly can respect that. It’s basically just Hrax, if Hrax was a dwarf planet-borderline-asteroid and still had most of its mining deposits. The air here is about as bad, because Nova doesn’t bother to filter it when they can just wear breathers.

It’s not quite Hraxian air, but the Hraxians chug on through it anyway. It has the same slightly weighted feel to it, the same viscosity that makes you think it never quite gets breathed all the way out. 

It’s a weird realization to find he doesn’t actually _miss_ Hrax all that much. That does not mean he likes it here, but he doesn’t find himself trying to sniff for familiar scents.

Later that year, they move and split the colony in two. Kraglin finds out later that the last batch of “prisoners with jobs” that’d come in included some of the longer-lived members of the rebellion back home. They shot the ones deemed to be most in charge and then separated everyone else that seemed to tolerate each other.

He considers, once or twice, asking one or two if they know Jae. But he decides he’d rather live in ignorance of whether or not the dumbass brat had listened to him, and…

Well, the funny thing is.

He can’t remember how Jae smelled.

\---

At seventeen-nearly-eighteen, some of the others attempt to escape.

Goes about as well as Kraglin was expecting. No outside help, no one among them had bothered trying to learn how to get past Nova codes or how to work a ship beyond there.

He’s been fully grown for several years now, but just as skinny as he’d been when his last teeth came in. He’s taller, which is nice. He’d also spent most of his energy when he wasn’t busting his ass doing the same damn thing he’d have done back home: studying what Xandarian he could off readouts and tools, and the ships that would come in for shipments. One lucky day, he gets to actually board one when they need something pulled outta a duct and a thin arm will do. That’s when he swipes a pad. The idiot he stole it off of was definitely asking for it, given there’s not even a password.

This makes learning it go much faster.

It’s shaky, and he’s pretty sure he’s got a definite accent, but he learns the important, practical bits of Xandarian, and after scratching with a makeshift knife into the wall of his cell, he decides he can probably write it too.

He does not let the Nova figure out what he’s doing, and is careful to scratch out the scribbles and only speak Hraxian unless he is certain he’s completely alone.

He keeps hoarding documents and even a few books, figures out enough language to actually start _learning_ something. A few somethings, actually, because it’s easy to get bored on a mining colony.

Ship schematics are _fascinating_ , he decides.

Something whispers in his ear that _this_ is why he never felt at home on Hrax. He ignores it, because wanderlust isn't helpful to the prison-mining lifestyle.

 

When he’s eighteen and a few weeks from finally having a plan to leave together, the Ravagers come. 

It plunges the whole mining operation into chaos, and sends everyone to scattering. The Nova destroy the tunnels, probably in an attempt to stop from being flanked. It might’ve worked too, but he’s still lanky and has all the power of a Hraxian in crisis at his disposal, so he wriggles his way free.

He takes this opportunity to steal his confiscated knives back, and use them to off one of the supervisors. He’d use his teeth, but given that he doesn’t know at that moment that it’s the Ravagers- or who they are, actually- and the fact he thinks that would be too noble and quick, he doesn’t.

He hopes blood won't short the controls and shut the whole place down. It'd be very grating to get this far and fail now because Xandarians have to be jackasses even in death.

It doesn't happen. Kraglin considers trying to go for one of the Nova’s ludicrously shaped starships, but he doesn't do that either.

What he does do is sit patiently by the command consoles and wait for the raiders to come in. Two of them finally do come in, one that he thinks is Xandarian or some cousin species, and the other looks like they’re made of ice.

When they spot him and the dead super, the one in charge- at least he’s assuming, because there’s more glittery bits- slowly approaches him and asks in Xandarian, “Do you have a translator?”

Well, no, of course he doesn’t, he’s Hraxian, and the knowing look on the man’s face tells him he’s already figured that.

Hraxians pretty much knew enough Xandarian to listen in to Nova Officers, and then Hraxian. Written Hraxian though, is more sparse. He can read and write just because his _Leanar_ insisted he had to since he was the eldest, and before he’d stolen that holopad, that hadn’t been anywhere near acceptable in space. You just didn’t really need to know much else to get by on Hrax, and as they weren’t supposed to really _leave._..

Kraglin, though, grins and says back to him, “Nope, but I understand ya just fine.”

His grin widens when they both seem shocked.

The man chuckles after a minute of silence, and glances back to the shiny-crystalline-Kraglin-still-can’t-decide-what, before he looks back at him. “How old are you, kid?”

“Adult, back home. Standard, eighteen last week.” He shrugs. Things get fuzzy when you’re dealing in different years from different worlds that revolve around their suns at different speeds. Truth of the matter to him is he’s been adult since he cut his last row of teeth.

The man seems to consider this for a minute, glancing back at his companion again. For a second, Kraglin’s worried they might just leave, and then where’s he gonna be?

“Ever consider joining the Ravagers?”

(The next translator update to the _Starhawk_ ’s crew involves a guide to Hraxian they ripped out of the mainframe’s outpost, and that Kraglin had added to so it wasn’t only nit-picky basics, just so momentary lapses don’t get questions. No one seems to notice, and he still mostly speaks Xandarian anyway.

Hraxian is just something he speaks in when he’s alone, or needs a creative curse, or when he’s around the few people he fully trusts.

There never are very many.)

\---

At eighteen and a few weeks after, Kraglin watches as Admiral Ogord and his medic enter him into the system as a Xandarian. They have his actual scans and biodocs, of course, but they’re locked behind a command-grade encryption. As far as the rest of the _Starhawk_ ’s crew is concerned, he’s the rare Xandarian prisoner on a mining colony this far out of main Nova space.

This lasts for about a month before he gets sussed out the first time. Kraglin is working as a technician and mechanic down in the M-Ship hangar when it happens. About four days prior, a new M-Ship had popped up in the space by the other officer’s ships, and it was scuffed to all hell. He was supposed to fix it, upgrade it, and then repaint it. There hadn’t been much else he could do besides stare for a minute and then say, “Yes, boss,” and get to work.

Thankfully, most of the damage is easy to buff or pop back out, or just rip a panel off and replace. The upgrades are internal and for the targeting arrays, which have some _interesting_ statistics and mods.

It still takes four full days, and he doesn’t sleep a minute on any of them. By the time he wanders over to the officer running the maintenance block that day, he’s nearly stumbling. He manages to confirm the work as done, and is left by the console while the officer jogs off in the rough direction of the bridge.

He stands there for a minute, swaying loosely and trying to pull two words together into a sentence when someone sidles up beside him and puts a light grip on his shoulder. “Alright, let's get you off to bed.”

 Kraglin nearly snarls in protest before he drags a sniff of air along the roof of his mouth and relaxes. It's just Tullk, one of the senior mechanics. So instead he settles for a barely audible grumble of “‘M fine.”

Tullk laughs at this. “Sure, rookie. How long you been up anyway?”

It takes Kraglin a few shuffling yards and moments of thought to come up with “Seventy… seventy-six hours…? No, been its been long… ninety-two?”

His senior gives him a look thats two-parts disbelief and another three-parts disappointment. “We need at least six hours to every twenty to function, rookie.”

Kraglin takes a bleary offense to this, shaking his head and saying, “Four for thirty-two.” It's not _untrue_ , but it's also the kind of behavior that'll lay out a Hraxian for several days afterwards. That's something like the bare minimum, and he hasn't been making that. He estimates he’ll probably need to drop for a whole thirty-two now. Or something like that, the luxury of full sleep isn’t one many Hraxians have experienced. The whole thing is kinda a hazardous guessing game, really.

Tullk is giving him an odd look now. It's about that time that he takes another breath through his teeth and bothers to taste the tang beyond basics and, well damn, it was Xandarian under the grease and oil and sweat.

Of course, Kraglin’s muscles choose that exact moment to pull his jaw into a yawn, giving Tullk a nasty view of his visible row of teeth, and bits of gum that barely covered the other two.

There was the _click_ of Kraglin’s jaw slotting back together and then an awkward silence that consisted of Tullk eyeing him and Kraglin trying to weigh in his failing logic how much trouble he’d get in if he bit him.

Probably a lot, Tullk is a senior mechanic after all. Plus, Kraglin kinda likes him, so biting him would be a shame.

Finally, Tullk shrugs and keeps on hauling Kraglin towards the crew quarters. Being as out of it as he is, Kraglin has to ask, “You aren’t… going to say something?”

The older ravager snorts, shaking his head as he shifts to open a door. “Seen weirder. Should’ve guess ya were just as weird when you dropped that wrench yesterday and started cussin’.”

Kraglin feels color flush his cheeks and gives a weak protest. “It _hurt!_ ”

“Point is that I saw you bite it after.” Tullk drawls as he swings him into a bunk. “And none of your teeth came out.”

“Of course they wouldn’t! They’re stronger than that.” He scoffs at the thought. What kind of Hraxian would he be if his teeth broke that easy?

“Just get some sleep, idiot.”

Kraglin almost starts to protest, but darkness swims over his vision before he can respond.

 

He gets about five hours of sleep before someone barges in and shakes him awake, calling his last name at him. He huffs a weak growl and tries to push them off, until his hand connects with something _very_ solid and his brain wakes up enough to tell him that the one yelling at him is _Martinex._

That gets him up pretty fast. The Admiral’s first mate doesn’t just go around yelling at people for no reason, and he struggles to get upright and focus his eyes. Why _was_ Martinex in- he was guessing this was Tullk’s bunk? He didn’t think he’d gotten into any trouble.

Oh. The M-Ship.

Flark. Had he really been too sleep-weak to finish it properly? He hadn’t felt tired until he’d told the officer that he was done.

When he’s finally awake enough to see five feet in front of him, Martinex motions for him to follow. And yep, guess it’s something about the M-Ship, because they’re headed to the bay. Well, this didn’t bode well. It was the first major thing he’d been told to do and _apparently_ it somehow went wrong.

When they get there, the bay is pretty much empty, except for the Admiral, him and Martinex, and someone else standing with the Admiral. It’s pretty obvious who, even at a distance, even if Kraglin’s never seen him in person before.

There’s only one Centaurian on board the _Starhawk_ , after all.

Kraglin isn’t entirely surprised to see him now. He’d figured out the M-Ship was his fairly easily. Pilot logs weren’t exactly private and Udonta was the only high-ranking officer without an M-Ship in the bay before this last week.

The _Warbird_ had, after all, just gotten back.

That was part of why he hadn’t slept in four days- ship needed to be done fast and perfect. If you didn’t want to disappoint the Admiral on a normal occasion, you sure as fuck didn’t want to disappoint him where Udonta was concerned.

But none of them seemed upset. Or at least, they didn’t _smell_ mad, but that wasn’t a great indicator given he wasn’t used to being around any of the three species and didn’t know the finite details.

Plus, Martinex only smelled like his uniform and the rest of the ship, which was _extremely_ unhelpful. An advantage for him to be sure, but it was annoying for Kraglin.

“Obfonteri.” The Admiral greets as he and Martinex come to a halt a few feet away.

“Sir.” Kraglin is trying to keep the nerves out of his voice. It’s… mostly working. It’d probably work better if he’d been sleeping, so he’s starting to see Tullk’s point about that.

“I see you finished the repairs to the _Warbird._ ” The Admiral gestures at the M-Ship hanging in it’s berth beside them.

Udonta is giving him a look that Kraglin can’t decipher, and is too nervous to stare back long enough to figure out.

When the silence persists for a minute, the Admiral speaks again. “The paint job is interesting. How’d you know the words?”

The works in question were some he’d added to the trim. It was written Centaurian, which was a pretty weird language and he’d probably spent too long on that part of it. He had almost thrown the ‘pad into the engine block after the first few hours.

It was probably a slightly _too_ -Hraxian thing to have done. What use for written word they had was pretty much reserved for writing down little repeated phrases and sayings, usually that were for protection or victory in whatever came their way. The _Warbird_ had looked like she needed it.

“It weren’t that hard, just do some searching around and then some translating. Definitely can’t speak it though, ain’t built for that.” Kraglin explains, still feeling very much like he’s in trouble. He hadn’t really thought that it might be the _wrong_ thing to do.

The Admiral finally seems to notice that Kraglin is nervous. “You’re not in trouble, Obfonteri, we were all just surprised.” That finally relaxes him.

“I, uh, I didn’t really mean anything by it? I just thought it’d look nice. I’ve seen writing on ships before so I just. Did it.” Kraglin realizes then that technically he’d probably been meant to just paint it the _same way_ it had been. Whoops? Maybe he really should have slept once while he was working.

Admiral Stakar gives a slow nod and says, “Well, that’s all I wanted to ask. You can go, Obfonteri.”

Kraglin salutes the Admiral, gives Martinex a glance, and leaves as quickly as he can without being obvious about it.

Udonta hadn’t stopped staring at him the whole time. Kraglin sticks a little closer to Tullk for the next few weeks, feeling… not quite threatened, but _examined_.

It slips from his mind when nothing else happens.

 

A couple of months later, and he gets called down to the M-Ship bay one shift. It’s not unusual, as the officers who oversee maintenance and all apparently like him because he’s quiet and knows what he’s doing. Means he’ll get pulled off other shifts sometimes after away-missions and they need extra hands to get everything in working order before the next run.

This time, though, he gets a holopad lobbed at him and a strangely chipper “Congrats” from the officer on duty. Usually when you came in, you’d get sent instructions, and the only time anyone said that was when you were doing one of the pilots known to be rough on their ship. But that had sounded sincere, and this was a new pad.

When he checks to see what’s going on, all it has on the form is a berth number and a dash where the name should be. So he wanders down the rows of ships, and then stops when he gets to the one indicated.

It’s a shiny new M-Ship, orange with black trim, and there’s white marks all along the outer edges and seams on it. When he gets closer, he realizes it’s writing, and it’s in _Hraxian_.

This was not what he expected.

He hears someone clear their throat behind him and he whirls around, startled. It’s Udonta, and he looks a little startled himself at how fast Kraglin moves. “Uhh… thought I should thank you. For fixin’ the _Warbird._ ”

Kraglin would usually say that a shiny new M-Ship isn’t equivalent to a repair job, but given how the _Warbird_ had _looked_ when the Admiral assigned him to fix it, it probably was. That and he thought he might be slightly in shock.

And truth is, she looks beautiful. Probably good as the _Warbird_ , if he wants to admit to pride over how that had turned out.

“Thanks.” He finally manages, glancing back over his shoulder. “It’s, uh. Nicest thing anyone’s ever given me.” And pretty much the only thing, besides the Admiral getting him _off_ that mining outpost, but that was something he was working to repay.

There’s kind of an awkward pause, and Kraglin takes it to think through something rapid fire. This is probably only the second time he’s seen Udonta, although he’s heard about him. He gets the feeling- and the smell- that the Centaurian probably only has command crew and maybe some of the bridge for company most of the time. Between the Admiral and the fact that he is technically an officer, he probably doesn’t have many friends.

Kraglin doesn’t really either, except for Tullk, who he’s gotten to know better after sleeping off his _Warbird-_ induced deprivation in his bunk. Mostly because he’s a rookie, and also because he doesn’t really know how to do _social situations_. He is one of the few Hraxians to leave their planet and their culture, and he’s not entirely sure how “friends” work.

He thinks though, that he and Tullk are friends. At least, Kraglin has decided to assimilate Tullk into his new pack, and any other Hraxian who crosses them will know that.

He thinks that he could fit Udonta in too.

So he decides to just go for it. “You on first shift?”

Udonta seems surprised by this, and maybe the slightest bit suspicious. “Yeah?”

“I came here straight outta quarters, gonna go to the mess now. Wanna come with?”

And that’s the question that pretty much starts the whole Yondu-and-Kraglin thing that goes on for the next forty-some-odd years.

And it’s how Kraglin gets the _Mollymauk._

 

One night, after their first mission the Admiral assigns them to together, they’ve snuck off from the rest of the Ravagers to sit on the ramp-up into the _Warbird,_ with the _Mollymauk_ a short distance away. It’s quieter out here, with just the two M-Ships, and Kraglin thinks they’re both a little oversocialized. He’s felt it himself, so he doesn’t mind slinking off with Yondu for a few hours. 

It’s there, when they’re a mixture of drunk on long-faded adrenaline and the bottle of booze Yondu snuck off the _Starhawk_ , that Yondu admits to Kraglin that he doesn’t actually know what the words he’d painted on the _Warbird_ mean.

“I could uhhhh... teach ya.” Kraglin chews on his lip with his teeth.

Yondu gives him a _look_ , the kind that means he thinks he’s being patronized. Kraglin quickly backtracks.

“I meant that I can show you _how_ to start. Definitely not teaching you a language.” He moved to picking at his teeth. “‘S like how I learned Xandarian. If I wanted to pity ya, I’d just tell ya what it said. But I don’t."

Heritage, he thinks, is something that every man deserves. ‘Specially if they want it. He has what part of his survived, and he gets to do with it what he likes. Tullk has _all_ of Xandarian history at his fingertips if he wants.

Yondu deserves the chance to take what he wants from his too.

Whatever Yondu is looking for in his face, he guesses he finds it, because after a minute Yondu grins at him and says, “Sure, why the hell not.”

So Kraglin shows Yondu how to look for _actually helpful_ shit on the galactic wide ‘net, and they manage to find some innuendos and Yondu even makes up some creative ones of his own, and they laugh and giggle like four-year-olds well into the night.

Kraglin even teaches Yondu some Hraxian. They’re just curses, and he hears them a few times over the next near-forty years when Yondu is being creative.

He knows when Yondu deciphers the words on the _Warbird_ , because one day he’s working on the _Mollymauk_ after another away mission, and the Centaurian comes and sits by the panel he’s got pulled open. He doesn’t say anything for a while, and Kraglin just keeps working.

Something he’s learned about Yondu is that you don’t push him, just let him come to you in his own time.

After a while, when Yondu is handing him a tool he asks for, he quietly says one of the phrases Kraglin had painted into the trim.

 

At some point, he loses his first adult tooth. It’s just out of his primary row, thank flark, and he keeps it in one of his jumpsuit pouches.

It had been knocked out during a row in a bar. Some Kree had said something… well, something _stupid_ and Kraglin had sort of just. Snapped and slammed a knife up through the bottom of their jaw.

Things got a little hazy after that, between adrenaline, the atmosphere makeup that had already made him a little woozy before he got buzzed, and getting punched in the face hard enough to knock out one of his teeth.

When he comes to the next day, mouth hurting and with the headache slowly draining away as his system started to wake up, he finds a new knife laying near the bottom of his bunk and knows that Yondu must’ve come into the crew quarters and left it.

He’s not entirely sure what happened how he got back here, or what exactly happened after he’d been hit. Or _how_ he managed to find his tooth on the floor of whatever bar it had been.

He knows they won, though, and that it was absolutely worth it.

A few weeks later, the doc hammers a little plate of metal into his gums in the hole it left behind. Apparently, it'll deal with the pH of his mouth as good as his teeth, though Kraglin fiercely disagrees that _anything_ that they put into his mouth would be as good as his original teeth.

But still. It’s a _sign_ of something, sure as the knife that he now carries.

 

Twenty-two and they’re sent on their first away by themselves. They nearly get themselves caught and killed several times, but they come back to the _Starhawk_ laughing and grinning, and the _Mollymauk_ gets permanently moved to a berth on one side of the _Warbird_ , Martinex’s blue-and-gold-cyan-trimmed-nightmare of an M-Ship still on the other side. 

They get assigned to more pair missions after that. Pretty much as soon as he’d befriended Yondu a few years back, he’d suddenly gotten jumped up onto the senior crew rosters. Often, it’ll be the two of them and Tullk and some of the other officers, but just as often it’s just them. He gets the feeling that Stakar had been testing them before. He’s not sure what Stakar decided he saw, but he’s grateful for the approval nonetheless.

He gets moved into senior bunks not too long after the _Mollymauk_ is moved, which is less of a change because he already spent more than a handful of nights in Tullk’s bunch when the Xandarian was on shift and he was off. Now he just sleeps a bunk over from him. He’s pretty sure that the two of them make the lives of everyone else in the block miserable, and most scatter when Yondu comes down from wherever it is that he sleeps to join them.

They should probably all be grateful they’ve never gotten complaints from the quartermaster, but it’s kinda hard to care about that most of the time.

 

At twenty-five, he comes back into his bunk to find a bundle on it. He’s gotten used to Yondu coming in their bunk block- no one has ever tried to mess with anything, because they know they’ll get whistled at and Stakar won’t help them- and leaving things on his bed at random, so he’s not very surprised. He’s been busy for a couple weeks and really only seen Yondu at mess a couple times.

He’s missed him, to be honest. He’d thought about asking him if he wanted to hang around after a shift or something, but he’s seen Yondu with Stakar more than usual, and knows the importance of sleep by now.

Plus, Tullk had threatened to strap him to his bunk if he tried pulling anything long than a three-day period of work, and he doesn’t doubt that the Xandarian would.

So he figures he’ll either comm Yondu a thanks or just mention it at mess. Yondu seems to preen at the acknowledgement the same way Kraglin likes leaning on people.

Then he actually moves to examine it and realizes that it’s not something wrapped up. He carefully unfolds it, pupils slowly going blown as he examines it.

What it is, is a new leather jumpsuit, fresh outta the tailor. He can tell, because it still carries the smell of dye and fresh treatments against decay or damage. There’s a knife holster underneath it that looks suspiciously sized to fit the knife Yondu had given him a few years ago.

The thing is, though, that the whole thing is a rich maroon-merlot red.

Kraglin is confused. The leathers he’s wearing right now are dark blue with some black accents. He hasn’t seen all the Ravager factions in his time with the _Starhawk,_ sure, but he’s pretty sure there isn’t one using these colors. And he’s pretty sure Yondu left this here.

There’s one thing for it. He has to go track Yondu down and ask what’s going on. There’s an inkling of an idea in the back of his mind, but it hasn’t actually formed into a coherent explanation yet.

He can’t help curiosity though, and he strips and changes into them. They’re definitely for him though, the fit is perfect and he get confirmation that the knife does indeed fit into the holster. In an impulsive mood, he decides not to change back.

He gets some weird and curious looks as he makes his way up to the bridge where he assumes Yondu is. When he passes by the open area near the bridge that a lot of the higher-ups use to fill out their reports, he sees Martinex, who looks up as he passes and grins and throws him a thumbs-up.

Alright, so whatever this is, Martinex apparently knows what it is or is in on it.

He can’t tell if that's reassuring or not.

He gets to the bridge, and hesitates a bit. He’s only been up here a couple of times, mostly with Tullk, and he’s not exactly sure he can just… walk in there.

That lasts for about three seconds before he decides fuck it, if he gets in trouble, which honestly he doubts because the Admiral really doesn’t seem to mind Kraglin being around even when it probably is distracting Yondu, then he’ll just deal with it.

When he gets in, Yondu and the Admiral are off on the far side of the bridge, talking. A few of the navigators glance up and he gets more grins and thumbs-up from then. That’s about the point he starts feeling really weird. He knows Martinex, well, he _slighty_ does, by association with Yondu, but he doesn’t know most of the bridge crew at all.

That’s about the point that he stops, because Yondu isn’t wearing blue-and-black leathers either. He’s wearing the same red that Kraglin is, and enough detailing and gold accents to match Stakar’s. When they notice him, Yondu grins and marches over, putting an arm around his shoulders. “You accept, then?”

“What?” Kraglin absolutely feels behind now.

He can hear Stakar chuckling. Yondu just keeps grinning, and jostles him a bit. “Do you accept first mate? The old man says that next stop is to pick up a ship, and then we can snipe some crew and go.”

Everything suddenly clicks into place with a brilliant clarity.

Yondu is wearing new leathers that are shiny as the Admiral because he must have made _captain_ this week. That explains the whispering about change coming, the meetings, and-

And well, why there were red leathers in his room. Yondu wants him to go with him.

Wait.

Yondu wants him to be _first mate._

Well, there’s only one answer to that. Even if he hadn’t realized he had technically already made it back in his shared quarters.

Kraglin grins back at him. “Obviously, boss.”

\---

Having their own faction- well, _Yondu’s_ faction, technically, but Kraglin has been here since there _was_ a faction- is flarking great. Maybe not all of the actual responsibility, because unlike Yondu, who’d been getting personal training from the admiral for years now, Kraglin is technically qualified at best to be a tech and mechanic.

  
Thankfully, he learns quickly.

Once he gets started on it- no thanks to Martinex, who only laughs at him when Kraglin bothers to comm him with a question- he finds that he doesn’t even mind bits of it. There’s definitely a control aspect to it. Kraglin’s never _had_ this much power over what he’s doing and when. Even if he doesn’t always enjoy pulling double shifts and digging through lists of potential scores, it’s nothing that he’s been made to do.

The only person he has to listen to is Yondu, and the Admiral on the rare occasion that Stakar wants them to do something specific.

Stakar got him off that colony in the first place, and Yondu is his pack leader and closest friend. He would walk into a fight with just his teeth and bare hands if Yondu asked, and he has. More than once.

For a faction only a few years old, the 99th are getting pretty infamous. Which for Ravagers, means they’re getting up there with the elder factions.  

A lot of their crew had come from the _Starhawk_ too. Tullk had transferred along with them, and is now bridge-ranked and also serves as the archivist. Some other seasoned senior crew had come along too, mostly people Yondu knows better than Kraglin does. Kraglin trusts them because he knows Stakar is overprotective of Yondu, and because Yondu is generally a fairly good judge of character.

Good crew, good captain, and a fairly decent ship even if the _Elector_ isn’t anywhere near her fresh-outta-spacedock days, can do a lot for reputation.

The most nerve wracking thing he does is go with Yondu on a pretty tight mission with a bunch of the senior captains and Admiral Stakar. That’s the first time he meets Aleta Ogord, for one, and she is _terrifying_. Martinex also seems to take his involvement as a sign to go from “impish c-o” to “impish friend(?)”. He gets ribbed at almost too many times to count, and the first few times he isn’t entirely sure what to do.

After about the fifth time Yondu heaves a sigh and pulls him aside and tells him to quit _worrying_ so much, and that while he’s not technically on the same level as any of them, they’re not gonna bite.

Kraglin is slightly mortified, but he adapts. By the end of that, he decides that Martinex isn’t so bad. The Ogords, though, they still scare him, but at least he doesn’t jump when they get close without warning.

 

He _thinks_ he’s something like 28 when he gets his face ripped open.

Well, not his whole face, just part of a nasty ring around his right eye.

They’re out on a job, and as things often do when it seems too easy, they’ve ended up in an ambush of sorts. Kraglin usually sees these things coming earlier, if only because he bothers to think things all the way through. Yondu does too, but he also gets distracted by shinies easier, so as First Mate it’s usually Kraglin’s job to keep them all in one piece when the unexpected happens.

It’s a little hard to do that when they’re in tighter quarters and the arrow- usually t e first way out of these situations- is leaning into liability territory. He’s had to maneuver once already to give Yondu a clearer shot, and he can’t use any of his light knives designed for throwing, because there’s the smallest fluke chance he’d lose one at the same time the arrow went whizzing by.

That’s alright, though. The old fashioned way is just slower.

All things considered, it was going pretty well up until one of their would-be-ambushers decides he wants to bring a gun into what is _obviously_ a knife-arrow-fist fight.

Honor among thieves is a lie. There is only honor among Ravagers, because Stakar and the Code forbade anything else.

Cap’ns not gonna see it before they get him, so Kraglin does the only natural thing.

He switches to his longer knife and _throws_ himself forwards.

There's a satisfying _crunch_ of bone as the knife connects, and a strangled noise. Something hits the ground with a metallic thud and goes spinning away.

Unfortunately, there's also a burst of pain through his head and a feeling like something is grating directly onto his screaming nerves, and a sudden curtain of blue that sprays across his vision.

He doesn’t fumble the knife. He just grits his teeth against each other, ignoring the grind of metal on enamel. Instinct pulls a knife in his other hand and finds the weakest, most vulnerable part he can and digs it in.

Time goes a little fuzzy after that, but he can hear a _thunk_ from in front of him and his knives both come free, so he deems it a success. He can’t tell if the rest of the fighting has died down, because now his ears are ringing, and when a shape gets too close he lashes back out with the long knife.

Through the navy blur in his eyes, he can tell that the only maroon on the second one he’s downed is blood.

Something in the background is making an awful amount of noise, but his vision is starting to go black-and-blue now, and it’s all he can really do to make a last sweep around him to make sure that he hasn’t missed anyone too close to him. He manages to slide his knives back home, and goes to wipe some of the stinging away.

This turns out to be a _horrible_ instinct, because it makes his vision light up like a live wire in a scrub wash, and everything cuts out.

 

He wakes up in the medbay on the _Elector_ with a mask over his nose and mouth, heavy metallic-tinged air weighing down his lungs. If it wasn’t for the fact the air was coming through a mask, it might’ve crossed his mind that he was dead.

But as it is, he shifts and winces when that brings a whole shock of pain to his head. It feels like he has a migraine and like his face is partially on fire all rolled into one. His right eye won’t open. _Shit_. Kraglin’s never been one for cybernetics, and he doesn’t really want to change that stance now.

His left eye can mostly open though, which is an immediate relief. He can see part of the bay, and what he does see of it shows him that Tullk is sitting next to him, half slouched. The Xandarian has his head hanging back a bit, and a pad near slipping out of his hands. He doesn’t look like he’s cleaned up yet, which has been… however long they’ve been back.

Kraglin notes with a detached sense of morbidity that Tullk’s leathers have blue all over them, but he’s not bandaged.

It occurs to him then that Tullk probably had been the one to carry him back to the ship. He can’t imagine that the Xandarian would let anyone else do it, except Yondu. And while Yondu was strong, he wasn’t exactly in a position to carry the frame of his first mate.

It wouldn’t be the first time Tullk had had to drag him somewhere when he was too out of it to do it himself.

The shifting to get a better look at his friend alerts him to some of his other injuries, that while not on his face, also hurt, so he lays back again and just inhales the facsimile of Hraxian air that’s being pumped to his lungs through the mask.

The doc had shown it to him a little while after they’d started off on the _Elector_ a few years back. It had been handed off to them by Admiral Stakar’s medic, who’d made it for Kraglin when he’d come aboard. Said something about how technically speaking, the air content of most planets and ships was for him what high altitude would be like for other species.

Kraglin had taken what he deemed important from that conversation- that being that he was adjusted to it and therefore didn’t really need to think about it again as long as vacuum wasn’t opened- but it meant that anytime he needed surgery he got a mask slapped over his face.

He takes a few minutes to dwell on that. He’d gotten a head injury, and the doc had pulled out the heavy stuff… that probably meant he was gonna get his ass chewed out.

And speaking of-

Tullk was stirring. The Xandarian yawned and froze when his eyes met Kraglin. They started at each other for a minute. Finally, the other man spoke.

“Oh look. Another gray hair.” Tullk drawled, raising a hand to pull at partially knotted clump. Then the calm, snarky facade dropped and the Xandarian huffed out a near choking breath. “Krags, never do that ever _fucking_ again.”

“Don’t plan on it.” Kraglin managed, but Tullk shot him a dirty look.

“I’m _serious_ , Krags. We- we thought ya were gonna die.” He ran his hand down his face, shaking his head. “Hraxian or not, you were bleeding everywhere and when you stopped responding…”

Kraglin shifted uncomfortably in the bed, cursing and wincing when it pulled at his injury. “I didn’t _try_ to get hit, Tul… Shit, was it really that bad?”

The look he got for asking that made him wince again. Tullk seems to take pity on him after another minute of sad squirming. “In yer oh-so-brilliant decision to fight the guy with the gun, ya missed the hand of knuckle-shivs.”

Ah. That explained why he didn’t remember seeing a weapon.

When Kraglin is silent for too long- he can’t really think of anything to say back to that, a cold ice block of dread in his gut at the realization that _flark_ he could’ve died back there- Tullk sighs, moving to stand. “I’d better tell Yondu you’re conscious. Everyone else is fine, by the way. Thought Yondu was gonna have a heart attack though.”

“What he do to the away team?” Kraglin feels just a _little_ bad for them.

“Well, the two he decided missed the ambush are still in the bridge, rest are on scrub and bogs.” Tullk waved a hand. “Too worried to get rid of anyone, if you catch my drift.”

Something warm and slightly fuzzy and probably a result of drinking in air actually meant fully for his lungs, he decides, settles in his gut at that. “Sure.”

Eventually, Tullk leaves, because Kraglin isn’t asleep anymore and the Xandarian still has bridge duty and a shift to finish. Kraglin just stays laying still and focuses on just breathing and not moving his head anymore than is strictly necessary.

As predicted, doc chews him out when they get back from the mess. It’s a long rant about how just because Hraxians are built to hit steel and keep running, he can’t just go around smashing his skull into blades. Kraglin is sufficiently cowed by this, and eventually doc leaves him alone and takes the mask away.

It doesn’t take much longer than that for him to get bored. He still can’t see out of his right eye, and the doc had told him it was under-pain-of-death staying covered for treatment for at least another week. Doc also told him that he can’t have a pad yet, because it might fuck up his still slightly shaky head.

 

Sometime between the fifth and sixth effort to count the rivet in the ceiling, he hears a faint whistling coming from outside the medbay.

Yondu comes around the frame of the door, stalking like an animal on the prowl towards Kraglin. If he wasn’t used to Yondu and the ways that he acted, he probably would’ve been as scared as any of the lower crew. But he can tell the difference between fury and fury-brought-on-by-concern.

The Centaurian stalks over to him and takes the chair Tullk had been sitting in earlier, and glowers at him. Kraglin does his best to look unperturbed, which is a little hard when all he can feel on half his face is numb pain.

“Krags- you.” Yondu starts, and then stops again, shaking his head. Finally, he settles for pointing at him and roughly saying, “Do that again, and I’ll space ya.”

“Yessir.” Kraglin answers, giving a little nod.

“Don’t call me boss when ‘m worried about you, idiot.” Yondu grumbles at him, but seems to relax just a bit.

Eventually, Kraglin gets up the courage to speak. “Y’know, everyone’s mad at me, but I’m just glad you’re fine.”

“How’da ya figure that, idiot?” Yondu glares at him again.

“They were goin’ for you, Yondu.” Kraglin says, matter-of-fact. “I took a calculated risk. P’ sure it was worth it.”

Yondu stares at him, before barking a laugh. “You’re a sentimental dumbass, Krags.”

Kraglin can’t help it: he grins. “Sure, but I’m Hraxian, and _your_ sentimental dumbass, Yondu.”

A few months after he’s allowed back on full duty and a while after he finally gets “possible eye trauma” marked from his record, they get a job offer from some guy named Ego out in the furthest reaches of Andromeda.

And that’s when the trouble starts.

It starts slow, with a slightly uneasy feeling and a couple detours a year.

And then it knocks and opens the door.

\---

Kraglin is somewhere in his thirties when they end up permanently taking on a Terran.

Pete’s an irritating kid, sure, but soon as they’d first taken him on board Kraglin had known they were keeping him. Weren’t taking him to Ego, but they couldn’t just leave him on Terra for whoever else the jackass might hire to pick him up. Couldn’t really just drop him off anywhere either. Terra was even more of a closed off planet then Hrax, and it’d be pretty damn obvious he wasn’t from anywhere they tried to leave him.

They don’t bother locking his medrecs under Xandarian specs, because the crew already knows. Stakar already knows too, as it turns out. Kraglin stands by while Yondu gets reamed out and then cast out, watches with a painful twist as some of the people he’s spent years with, thinks of as his, walk off and leave. He can’t fault them. They’re outlaw’s outlaws now, and Stakar might not take them back, but might not be as vehement against them if they get out now.

The One Who Knows is reminding them all _why_ he’s been called that.

There’s no question of his staying. This is his own and his pack is still here, and he swore to follow Yondu till the death.

‘Sides, even if Pete is irritating, he finds he doesn’t mind him as much as he thought he would. The first day that he’d been working on something on his non-bridge shift and Cap’n had shoved the Terran into his space, he’d immediately remembered all the times he had to drag Jae along with him.

But Pete isn’t Jae, and Kraglin’s not the same kid he was when he got arrested the first time and shipped off Hrax. So he starts teaching Pete how to actually _read_ the different languages the fresh translator they’d snagged for him can do in audio, and gives him an older knife- Pete only gets to use his older ones, not because as the little pest complains because they’re “hand-me-downs” or whatever phrase it is, but because they are tried and true. They’re knives he’s fought with, gotten out of life or death scraps with. He ain’t giving Pete anything he hasn’t tried first. Terrans are like the antithesis of Hraxians, after all.

Yondu teaches him shooting, but Kraglin shows him diagrams of the species they see the most often and shows him how and where to hit when you don’t have the option to stay back. He shows him how to get across the oldest sections of the _Elector_ without making too much noise, and how to hide in the background.

Pete’s not so good at that part, but he does use it to startle Yondu on the bridge once, and Kraglin decides while he’s doing washing duty as a result of laughing at the Cap’ns face when he saw it was the kid that it was absolutely worth it.

It’s when he changes his biolock to let Pete in that he realizes that he’s taken the kid into his pack. It’s not really a surprise, all things considered: he’s taught him like he was family, has already stuck his neck out for the kid in a couple resupplies and tossed an unruly former crewmate into an engine block. But letting him into his space willingly is the thing that does it.

Kraglin’s always been pretty protective of what space he could get ahold of. It was the most precious premium on Hrax, bar units, and he jealously hoards his command crew quarters more than he does the _Mollymauk_.

First time he’s seen Yondu’s, Kraglin looked around the Cap’n’s room and shook his head. “There’s gotta be at least _fifteen_ fire code violations in here.” It was probably too kind to call the mess of clothes, trinkets, half-shattered datapads and who-knew-what-else a _mess_.

Pete’s room was getting to be the same way. He did the same thing Yondu did, except the weird trinkets he had were outta his remaining personal belongings and weird things that he found cool. Just because he liked the kid didn’t mean that his habits made sense. Terrans were _weird_. At least most of Cap’n’s trinkets were slightly valuable.

Kraglin’s own was mostly empty and clear. His possessions fit neatly in the drawers of his desk, on his two shelves, or in the bag shoved under his bed for emergencies. The messiest thing was his bunk, covered in sheets and furs and whatever else he found and deemed appropriate material for nesting. It was one of his allowances, no one was going to get into his room besides Yondu and Pete, and even if they did, there was no way for them to trace it to his being Hraxian.

Plenty of species like soft beds, and he’s first mate and that should come with _some_ privileges.

But back to the space- for one thing, Hraxians don’t really hoard items like Centuarans and Terrans apparently do. For another, the space was mostly clear because for him, it was a status. A few square feet of empty air? _His_ empty air? He may as well own a star.

And that’s why letting Pete come in is a big deal. It says he trusts him not to fuck with it, not to steal his shit, and not to track things in. This is his air, and he’s letting Pete use it. He’s let the kid use his nest too, because sometimes he gets nightmares and can’t stay in his room, and no one is stupid enough to break into Yondu’s quarters, not even Pete. So he lets him come into his room. It’s probably not great for the Terran’s self-reliance, but Kraglin was once used to it, so he doesn’t really give a shit. He’d rather have a well-rested Pete that he trusts in his room, than one that’s more frustrating, or some other crew. He doesn’t even let Tullk into his quarters, though he’s been in the Xandarian’s more times than he can count.

 

One night Pete is already in his room by the time Kraglin gets back from his shift, and the kid is angry faced. He was kind of expecting to see him at some point. Kid and Yondu had ended up in a yelling match, kid got scrubs duty and went off to sulk, Kraglin got an earful when he'd been getting a snack from the mess for his off-bridge time.

He'd come back here to work in peace, but he guesses that's gonna wait.

“Hey, Pete.” He says when the door closes with a _woosh_ behind him. The kid grunts a reply, so Kraglin wanders to his desk to pull out his personal pad and figures he’ll watch part of a holoserial he’s been secreting while he waits for Pete to talk to him.

It takes about half an episode before he hears something shuffling behind him.

He pauses the holo and turns on his stool. Pete looks more cleaned up now, though he's clearly still a bit mad. “‘Sup, Pete?”

He gets a small laugh at least when he uses the Terran slang, so that's a good sign.

“Hi, Krags.” Pete gives a shaky smile. Even better, he's doing nicknames.

Kraglin decides to pop the obvious bubble of tension. “Heard about you and Cap’n this morning.”

Pete looks slightly mortified and groans. “How do you already know.”

Kraglin raises an eyebrow. “Number one, I’m first mate. I know _everything_ that happens. Number two, Horuz wouldn't shut up long enough fer me to think.”

The kid groans again. “ _Great_. Did he at least mention that Yondu gave me scrubs again.”

“Yup.” Kraglin pops the word. “Also mentioned it shoulda been more given how you left.”

For a second the kid looks positively terrified. “Are you gonna give me more?”

He can't help it, he laughs. “Wha- _no_ , I weren't there and I ain't gonna change what the Cap’n said. Did wanna ask _why_ you did it though.”

Pete is quiet for a minute before he slowly speaks. “He doesn’t let me _do_ anything! There are rookies that have been around for less time than me that get to go out.”

“Yer what, twelve?” He’s not entirely sure, if he’s honest. One of the few things he’s never quite grasped in space is the relativity of time to planets and the species on them and therefore how age differences can be so miniscule but so significant. Probably why he just accepts whatever celebrations of age Tullk pulls him sidelong into whenever the Xandarian decides that the time of year calls for it.

“I can still handle stuff! You told me you learned how to use a knife when you were ten!” Pete protests, ignoring the question of age. Maybe Kraglin over-estimated?

“That’s cause I’m not a Terran.” Kraglin shakes his head. “Trust me, kiddo, you don’t want to be _anyone_ on board when they was twelve. Least of all me or Cap’n. Wouldn’t last twenty minutes.”

And he wouldn’t. He’d be easy pickings for some of the rare street animals, let alone a Hraxian. Kraglin could’ve easily taken Pete on. Kid didn’t have enough teeth and he was too squishy. At least he could survive a drop onto the metal when a foothold gave; Pete would probably shatter his legs.

And Yondu’s past…

Well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

He silences any protests Pete might have to that with a level stare, and the kid shuffles.

“Look, Pete, we’re just lookin’ out for ya. I know you wanna go on stuff, but there’s not a lot that’s safe for a kid, y’know? Even if you are good at stealin’.” Kraglin sighs. “I can see what I can do to find you stuff that’s more interesting than basic ship chores, but I can’t promise nothin’. Just tryin’ to keep you safe.”

“But-”

“Kid, I can promise that when you’re older and can haul more than your own weight, you’ll get to go do stuff.” Kraglin rubs at the scar above his right eye.

“So like the _Jungle Book_. ‘The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.’” Pete says. When Kraglin just looks at him like he usually does when Pete quotes some random Terran thing at him, he shrugs. “Something like that. I might not be remembering it right.”

It sounds very Hraxian to Kraglin. Right down to the basics. He decides he likes it.

Kraglin sits for a minute, considering. “Alright, kid, I'll cut you a deal. You help me do some repairs to the _Molly’_ s clipped wing and help me paint that on her, and I'll cut your scrubs time down.”

Pete perks up and enthusiastically nods. Working on the M-Ships seems to do that, and Kraglin has already been thinking that if Pete ends up being a good pilot when he’s allowed to do more than look at and occasionally do _teeny_ amounts of work on them, maybe a new M-Ship will be in order.

He’s already got the beginnings of an idea on how to paint it.

(The _Milano_ turns up a couple of years later, in about as bad of shape as the _Warbird_ had been the first time Kraglin had seen it, if not worse because technically speaking he’d boosted it from a repair yard. Not the first time he’s been achingly grateful the _Mollymauk_ is one of the faster M-Ships and has a towing cable.

He doesn’t tell Pete _why_ he’s fixing it, or why Yondu actually will come and try to help, or why he keeps pulling the kid off whatever duties he has to show him in specific, agonizing detail what crucial systems look like and how to fix them.

It takes a few weeks to dig up enough on Terrans to finish her, though. Although they did find a guide for their language- Pete isn’t the first Terran to get taken off-world after all, if he is rare and technically multiple degrees of illegal- it takes him a while longer to be certain on spelling and the characters.

By the time she’s done and fresh blue and orange with careful white trimmings, he’s fairly surprised Pete _hasn’t_ realized what he’s doing.

That doesn't diminish in any way the satisfaction when Pete _loses his goddamn mind_ when he throws a holopad at him, says “Congrats.” and waits.)

 

He gets stuck with Pete pretty often on runs to places like Contraxia. He doesn’t really mind it all _that_ much- he can still drink when the kid’s around, seeing as Hraxians have a very high tolerance for most alcohols. He just has to watch what he’s doing when he’s allowed to stick around. He’d rather be with Cap’n and Tullk and the rest of the bridge crew all the time, but he knows that Yondu trusts him to keep the kid out of trouble, and it’s not every time.

They just get shooed off whenever things go more towards the sure-we’re-technically-pirates-but-he’s-what-thirteen-max side of things. Occasionally, they can have standards.

So one of these times, Kraglin decides that rather than go back to the _Molly_ or just to some all-hours shop, there’s a night market here that’s relatively safe, so long as Pete doesn’t wander off.

As it stands, the kid immediately seems to light up and get excited by where they are. Kraglin’s not surprised; Pete loves the weirdest things. He’s decided that it’s because Terrans are weird and also because they aren’t starfarers. Stuff that to him is simply standard and normal, or that he’d never even think about, Pete thinks is amazing.

It makes it more than a little fun to let him pick random shit or just get it for him. Can’t spoil him too much, because even if they do still have plenty of shore runs, they also have a budget and Pete needs to learn good management for when he has full control of his own creds. But for now, it’s just the two of them, and Kraglin doesn’t mind sharing a bit of his take since he isn’t drinking tonight.

Just because he’s on babysitting duty and the kid doesn’t have money yet, doesn’t mean he can’t have fun.

So he follows Pete, watching him as he weaves underfoot, and snags him every so often when Pete gets too far ahead or looks like he’s too close to a questionable person. Not a lot of people pay them much attention though- this is not actually Contraxia, and is probably more reputable than that, and no one really bothered looking at them long enough to realize they were in Ravager garb.

Anyone who did bother giving them a second glance gave Kraglin that knowing smile where someone assumed you were a parent out with your kid. That’s not exactly wrong, in the sense that Pete is definitely his family and someone he’s teaching, but he’s definitely _not_ the kid’s dad.

But it gets them around even safer because no one is gonna try and fuck with a kid when their assumed parent is nearby. Not here when everyone is armed, and even if it is somewhat quiet, and very capable of fighting.

Pete keeps darting around to see different little bits of nonsense, and Kraglin buys himself a pouch of protein-floss to munch on while he keeps an eye on him- and on any possible new knifes or bits for the _Mollymauk_. When Pete notices that he’s grabbed something to eat, he comes close and sniffs at him.

Kid looks like a tiny Hraxian trying to scent like that. Kraglin decides that it’s kind-of cute, except he definitely looks like a _tiny_ Hraxian doing it. They scent with the organ in the top of their mouth, after all, not primarily with their nose. He digresses, Terrans are just weird.

“What is that?” Pete attempts to reach up and Kraglin swats his hand. Other reason he’s like a tiny Hraxian- doesn’t seem to realize that he’ll only share if he wants to.

“Protein-floss.” Kraglin considers Pete for a second, then weighs the infraction of already having trying to pinch some against the indulgent side he knows he has. In the end, he decides that they should just enjoy the night, and he can give him a hard time for trying to steal his food at a later time if it comes up. “Want some?”

Pete seems to consider, clearly not knowing what it is. His nose scrunches up a little and then he nods. Kraglin pinches a pit of the puffy stuff out of the pouch and hands it to him, wiping the small sticky beads it leaves on his fingers off on his leathers.

The kid considers the puff in his hand for a few seconds before he stuffs it into his mouth. He goes a little wide eyed and chews for a second before swallowing. “It’s like… cotton candy except it’s _jerky._ ”

“Uh-huh.” He pretends to know what Pete is talking about. “I’ll get ya a pouch of it if you like it.”

Pete lights up a bit and nods, and Kraglin keeps him close as he wanders back to where he got it and gets a couple more pouches, handing one off to the kid and stuffing the rest in the pouches of his leathers. Maybe he can use it as incentive later. Kid looks like he has that weird happy nostalgic face he gets when something reminds him of a Terran thing.

There’s two Terran “looks” he gets: one is good and one is bad. The bad one usually ends in the kid trying not to cry and everyone being distinctly uncomfortable.

So Kraglin is glad this is the good kind.

By the time they’ve finished wandering around, Kraglin’s found two new knives to shove into his boots and a few snacks to cram into his hoard, a couple of which Pete tries and gives him a few weird looks for, and one of which he shrieks at.

It is not Kraglin’s fault that whatever they’re named translates to “teeth fleas”.

Pete gets a couple downloads for his holopad and a couple of random trinkets that prove his theory that Terrans are weird and gravitate to the simplest things, but they make the kid happy and overall he’s spent less than half of what he got paid for this job.

It’s a good night.

\---

Kraglin is somewhere near to a side of forty, he thinks, the first time someone goes after him. They’ve probably had Pete for about a year or so now, and the last holdouts who thought Yondu would get sick of the kid who talked back to nearly everyone and caused plenty of trouble on the side-plus, more than a few were still upset about the whole banishment thing, which riles Kraglin to no end because if they think _their_ pain from it is bad-have realized that none of the command crew, nor the Cap’n, have any intention of getting rid of him.

He’s never really had to deal with outright _assassination_ attempts before. A couple upstarts had challenged him by ravager rites a couple times for his position, mostly near when they’d just started out as a clan. Those had been quick fights, and no one had gone for that in a while.

Kraglin is eating in the mess with Tullk, about to take a sip of his drink when a slight… hint of something brushes against the roof of his mouth. He frowns, and is about to dismiss it as the result of being tired, when it gets stronger and he drops the datapad he’s holding in shock.

Kraglin hasn’t smelled _aconifrox_ in years. The common name of it is Nova Orloni Poison, and it’s a nasty mix of chemicals designed to take out hardy pests, whole nests at a time if they’re small.

He recognizes it because it was something they’d originally designed and tested for _Hraxians_ . It had started as an attempt to find a drug to knock them out when Nova wanted to move them quiet-like, but in making it they’d hit on something Hraxians were _extremely_ allergic to. No one had ever figured out what it was, but it was enough to essentially paralyze the bits of Hraxians that protected them from most substances.

It was a horrible, awful way to go. He’d heard it induced Grand Mals as the rest of the chemicals worked their way through undefended organs.

They would use on pests too, but it’d also leech into the pipes when they found some new pocket of ore and tunneled. One of the first things _Leanar_ had taught him was how to sniff it out and what victims looked like and _never to eat them or I’ll skin your hide, Kraglin._

And the painful, sickly tang of it is what his heightened sense of smell has hit on.

He feels his whole body tense up, hand clenching on his mug. He knows his eyes have probably blown, and he faintly hears his blood rushing through his ears. He hadn’t felt cold, hard dread like this often, but it’s hard not to feel it now.

Because either someone _knows he is Hraxian, knows exactly what they’re doing, knows that the amount of smell he’s getting from the concentration mixed into his drink is more than enough to kill him (actually, it’s enough to send him back over the line from death. This is the kind of_ aconifrox _that makes those grand mals last for_ hours _),_ or they think he’s Xandarian and just want him well and truly _dead_.

He’s not entirely sure which of those scare him more. On one hand, if they know he’s Hraxian, that means either someone has lied about their hacking skills or pulled it outta the doc; on the other, _flark_ someone is still out to get him, and they might be after other command crew too. And _Pete-_

He makes himself put down the cup, autopilot taking over.

What he needs to do comes to him in list form, the fear compartmentalized and shoved outta the way.

First, he needs to check Tullk’s. That’s pretty easy to do, he just grabs it from him and sniffs. Tullk only puts up a “ _Hey-”_ in protest before he sees the look in Kraglin’s eyes and goes silent, and he knows the Xandarian’s own instincts are kicking in.

It’s clean. He compartmentalizes that too, and puts it down, calm as he can manage. He counts himself lucky that he’s long sense honed a particular way of responding to stress, one that means only people in his pack, who know him, can tell that he’s about to start throwing knives or stuffing panic into his stomach.

Tullk is still looking at him, and shifting. Yeah, he’s definitely broadcasting enough for him to tell something is _very_ wrong. Kraglin clears his throat and drops his voice low enough for just the two of them to hear. “Find Quill, and put ‘em in my room.”

Cap’n should be fine, long as no one fucks with the biolock on his door. This is a shift they don’t share, and he knows that whatever was done to his drink had to be more recent than when Yondu would’ve been through for a last snack before sleeping.

The Xandarian leans in a little, eyeing the cup Kraglin has abandoned. “Aye. Do you want me to lock down the bridge?”

Kraglin is now fairly certain this is only directly at him, but he still doesn’t like the thought that someone might sneak by him. “Yeah. I’m gonna check something out.”

Tullk looks a little unhappy at the idea of leaving him on his own, but does as he’s told and makes a show of stealing what's left of Kraglin’s meal and wandering out of the mess hall yawning and in the direction that’s the long way to quarters.

Kraglin waits a few minutes, playing nervously with some of the files on his pad before he clips it to his belt and stands, taking the cup with him and heading for the kitchen. Someone asks as he passes another full table, and he makes some comment about wanting an up or so in it.

The kitchen is what passes for a food preparation area by their loose standards, and a collection of store and freezer closets in a small block only accessible via it. He checks the duties list hanging by the door first to see if anyone on it immediately strikes him, and growls when it doesn’t.

He puts the contents of the cup through the biohazard vacuum and takes the cup itself with him, just so he can have the doc look at it for full analysis, provided the doc ain’t in out it. He’s inclined to trust them, but right now everyone he hasn’t spend the last decades brushing up against as other Hraxian deterrent is looking suspect. Probably panic seeping out.

In freezer block 2B, he finds a canister that puts off the sick tang of _aconifrox_ like it’s a beacon, and he’s about to take it and get the fuck up to the bridge, when something slams into the back of his head, and he drops like a stone.

_Flark_.

 

The first thing he notices when he wakes up is that it’s still cold. Means he’s probably still in the freezer. That’s fine, he can handle a bit of cold. It’s just uncomfortable, not debilitating.

Second thing is that he’s leaning against something solid, and given that seems to be the primary source of cold seeping through his leathers, he’s guessing it’s the wall.

Third is that his hands are bound behind his back. A quick test tells him he probably can’t get out of it without hurting a shoulder, and that the knife that’s supposed to be on the likely sacrificial shoulder is _gone_ . Panic and a new sense of rage take over from the groggy confusion. Weapon missing means that he’s in definite danger, and _that_ one missing is unacceptable, because it was the second thing Yondu gave him decades ago.

Shifting a little more reveals all his other outer weapons are gone too, but his mouth isn’t gagged which means that the most important thing for him to still have in situations like this is fine. He still has his teeth, and he can feel his jaw readying to deploy the second and third rows.

“Oh, flark, he’s waking up-” Kraglin freezes at the voice and looks up, squinting as his pupils adjust to see three crew. He only knows two of them, and barely at that. Some technicians that joined up a few years ago, fairly young and he’d say still green, given the overall idiocy of their whole plan.

Really, they went through all that effort to figure out what he was, and didn’t even have the sense to poison him in a way that wouldn’t be _immediately_ obvious to him. Did they research Hraxians at all beyond “how to kill them in two easy steps: brought to you by the Nova Core”?

(Poking holes in their plan is about the only thing keeping him from panicking at this point. He’s not a panicking person, but where he sits right now is _terrifying_ , and not just for himself. He dies, the rest of command loses these three into the ship halls. No one will know who did it. Tullk is in danger. Pete is in danger. _Yondu_ is in danger.

He also finds that while he has been willing to die for his pack many times over, he _really does not want to die._ )

He shoves frustration and fear aside and settles for a glare.

The one who’d first spoke looks a little cowed by it. “U-um, I’m sorry boss, but-”

“But we’re doing what we’ve gotta do. Brats gotta go.” One of the others snaps.

Kraglin can’t help but cut in then, between the protective anger over Pete, and the anger over the fact these absolute- “And your brilliant plan is to _poison_ me?!” He attempts to lunge forwards and snap at one of them with his teeth, and feels a grim satisfaction when all three move a little back. “Flark you think that’ll do for ya?”

“Get the Captain’s attention, at least. If we took him out, then everyone would be against us, but the first mate? That’s a warning.”

Kraglin suddenly realizes that stupid as they might be, they’re serious, and one of them has the _aconifrox_ in his hands. He feels his heart beat speed up. He should ask how they knew that it would work on him, should be struggling. But for some reason, he can’t.

All he can do is stare and then furious try to wrench his wrists free and scrabble for traction with his feet when the one holding the canister suddenly brandishes a syringe.

He finds himself praying to the old gods of a forest that no longer exists that he’s never believed in that if they’re really going to shoot the equivalent of celestial fire into his blood, that at least Pete, Tullk, Yondu all survive. He couldn’t die a pathetic death to grand mals and allergies in fucking freezer on his own damn ship to then have this stars-blasted plot _succeed_.

As soon as the one with the syringe gets within a foot of him, everything goes hazy.

 

Tullk tells him later what happened, because his view of events after that mostly involved feral, instinctual panic to get free regardless of if he had to tear his _damn shoulder all the way off_ , and then biting one of their throats out when he was free.

Cap’n had one of his little insomnia bouts where he comes down to the bridge at odd hours during his off shift, and saw Tullk had set the biolock to bridge only, something that was usually reserved for emergencies. Apparently, Tullk had been getting nervous too, and when Yondu had come in demanding to know what was going on, Tullk had told him.

That had led to Tullk realizing that Kraglin hadn’t commed him yet, which led to a hell-raising race down to the mess, then into the storage rooms, and finally Yondu’s arrow leading the way into the freezer block.

The one he hadn’t known was in fact the hacker, and was apparently someone they’d known and gotten aboard a few stops back.

Soon as they take care of the would-be-murderers, Tullk hauls Kraglin to the doc, who forces him to sit still on the raised table and take breaths from the tank of Hraxian mixed air while they profusely apologize for the encryptions ever being broken. He gets release with salve for the burns on his arms and with pills for his head, just in case.

At the same time, Yondu apparently had rounded up the crew and threatened them all within an inch of their lives. Horuz comes by his station the next day and says he’s pretty sure more than one of the crew were crying.

Kraglin is still too shaken then to laugh.

 

In all of the commotion, Kraglin forgets that he’d told Tullk to stash Pete. He’d forgotten entirely, actually, and is only reminded when his biolock doesn’t open immediately on flashing his handprint, and he has to punch in his command code.

It’s then that he remembers, because the door slides open, and he sees the kid curled up on Kraglin’s bunk, completely swathed in his nest. The kid looks like he's been crying, red-cheeked and snot-faced, clutching his music box in one hand and a bunched up fistful of fabrics in the other.

When he sees Kraglin, he starts sniffling again. It’s then that it hits him that he probably looks awful, blood in his hair and splatters of it dried on his leathers, sleeves rolled up and showing the red marks from being restrained, and the general air of someone who’s just come outta something bad.

He should probably clean himself off and change into his extras, but he’s exhausted, and now that he’s no longer about to die, he just wants to curl up until his next shift. Looking at Pete, though, he’s not sure he can bring himself to kick the kid outta his nest. Poor brat looks like he’d been really worried.

So he moves to sit down next to him, and Pete immediately latches onto him and starts crying. Usually, this would be a little annoying and bring the slight fear of someone calling him on sentiment, but damnit, he is a Hraxian and Pete is part of his pack, and if Pete wants to cry himself out, then he’s welcome to it.

Kraglin kind of wants to cry too, anyway, if that was something Hraxians did.

He shifts so he can get one arm around the kid, and leans back into the corner of his room.

A couple hours later, he’s still mostly asleep when he hears voices outside in the corridor. But they aren’t tones that set him on edge, so he lets himself keep drifting. A few minutes later, and he can hear his door _woosh_ open. But he knows that there’s only two people who can get in without the biolock on, and he slips back into sleep.

When he wakes up a shift and a half later, Pete is still tucked into his side and asleep, and Yondu is sitting across the room, back to his door, also asleep. The arrow is resting on the ground by his side.

 

The next time Kraglin goes down to the mess, he freezes up at getting a drink off the counter, and ignores it, going to sit down at a table without one. Tullk comes in a few minutes later, goes into the kitchen, and makes him a fresh one. He gets apologies from some of the other crew for not noticing anything, which is both nice and kind of amusing given most of them would miss the broadside of an M-Ship. Someone even leaves jerky outside his door a few times, and a few knives show up too.

Pete also shadows him pretty close for a while, which he appreciates both because he doesn’t want to be alone, and because he wants to keep a close eye on Pete. Yondu keeps turning up at odd times during shifts, feigning insomnia or important messages, to check on them, even when Kraglin knows that he’s definitely lying.

Kraglin may never stop sniffing at his food, but there’s a warm content in him at getting just a little bit looked after for once.

\---

He’s forty-something when he sees another Hraxian again for the first time in about thirty years. (At some point, he’d just stopped counting. The only number related to morality now was how many of _his_ were alive and safe when he finally bit spacedust.)

The command and bridge crew had all broken off from the rest of their motley band of exiles, tired after several rough jobs in a row. The decision to leave senior crew they trusted-all two of them, Kraglin scoffed-and wander a few blocks away to a nice, quiet bar had been near unanimous.

They were walking along in a little clump, about five conversations at once, and Quill-they sure as flark weren’t leaving the teenager _alone_ with the questionable-at-better-times crew-jammed in the middle of the clump like a little chick. Kraglin is half-hanging off Tullk already, arm slung across his shoulders and in the middle of some story when he opens his mouth and the scent slams into his teeth.

It takes him a second, but he spots them a few yards ahead. They’re staring at him. He glares back, baring bits of his teeth as he steadies his voice to keep talking.

Some tiny part of him he thought had been crushed to bits on a mining conveyor the better part of thirty years ago perks up with a pathetic pup-like curiosity, while the rest of him- forty-something and hard and _protective_ -snarls and tenses his jaw muscles to prepare for a fight.

He can see out of the corner of his eye that Tullk has definitely noticed his reaction. That’s alright, he trusts him, and if it goes to a fight, he knows that the Xandarian is one of the best he can have.

The staring match is abruptly ended when the other Hraxian slightly adjusts their head and mouth in what Kraglin knows is scenting. And then-

They bolt, vanishing down a side ally as fast as their legs can take them.

Kraglin grins and looks back at Tullk and slightly relaxes, slipping back into the story. A happy and content warmth settles in him at the knowledge that he’d definitely been the reason they’d bolted.

 

A few hours later, when they’re all well and truly out of it-besides Quill, obviously, who is absolutely not allowed to drink and keeps getting his hand whacked with the fletched end of Yondu’s arrow when he tries to filch a drink-when Tullk leans over.

“You ‘n that guy earlier.” The Xanadarian is still mostly understandable, amazingly. Tullk’s got a rare gift for being able to seem coherent when he really isn't. “Horuz and I been thinking, and we think they was gonna try hustlin’ us."

Kraglin is just Hraxian but even he's well based fully reasonable by now, which also means he's not thinking when he responds. “Sure, what ‘bout it.”

He catches Quill out of the corner of his eye frown and look up at him, but Kraglin figures he’s just trying to decide if his drink is an available heist, so he draws it closer and ignores him.

“They _ran_ reaaaal fast after they saw you.” At the ‘you’, Tullk reaches over to roughly poke Kraglin in the chest. “Almos’ like they knew ya.”

He feels a welling up of pride again from deep in his chest and gives what he knows must be a dopey looking grin and pushes away Tullk’s hand as he replies. “Cause ‘re like me, ya oaf. ‘Cept ‘m stronger.”

“That right.” Tullk grins. “Almos’ seemed like they were scared of the rest of us too. Saw ‘em doing that thing ‘ith their mouth like ya.”

“‘Course they were.” Kraglin lightly shoves Tullk then, laughing and still grinning. “Y’all smell like _me_.”

He thinks he hears Yondu choke a little on his grog, but when it stops after a couple seconds he doesn't bother to look over. Pete can handle it if the boss is actually in danger.

Tullk seems a little confused, so Kraglin pushes him again. “Our sense ain't just for hunting, Tul’. ‘S how you tell packs too. All the bridge smells like me. ‘Specially you, Pete, and the Cap’n. Means no Hraxian’ll ever fuck wit’ y’all unless they want to add three extra rows o’ teeth their mug.”

The Xandarian stares at him for a minute before laughing. “Territorial much, eh, Krags?”

Kraglin grins, showing most of his teeth. “You’ve got no idea."

 

The next day, Kraglin has second shift, and most of the rest of the bridge is on third. They’re still parked in atmo for the moment, and most of them are still out from drinking. Getting from his quarters to the mess involves stepping around a lot of sacked-out ravagers and Kraglin, as he always does after a day of shore leave, feels a deep grateful rush for the fact he’s Hraxian.

As expected, whoever was supposed to be on kitchen duty wasn’t, but Kraglin wasn’t annoyed. This was just what it was like, and it meant he had pretty much the whole mess to himself minus the few early risers who came in for a snack and then dragged themselves back to quarters.

Kraglin still didn’t really like being back in the kitchen, but so long as he doesn’t have to go back into the storage block, it’s fine. He makes himself a plate of some indiscriminate protein and grabs one of the sour fruits-type-things that are usually kept for sneaking into the mass pot. A lot of the crew got supplements for space-travel, because they didn’t like having to eat the stuff that had the nutrients pre-packaged, but he doesn’t mind and can eat them whole, seeds and all.

He admittedly has done this more than once in front of newer crew to scare them. Nothing like striking terror into the hearts of folks who don’t know about his reputed ability to eat anything.

He’s also made a decent amount of credits eating shit no one else will dare to touch.

The first time he got caught eating the acidic fruit, it had been at a rare meal with Yondu and Tullk both, and they’d stared at him for a good three minutes before Yondu had slowly said, “You bite those _uncooked?_ ”

It hadn’t really occurred to Kraglin to _not_ eat them that way, but at the reaction he got, he paused for a second and decided that they were just shocked, not mad, and so he just took another large bite of it and grinned at them.

They’d both made disgusted noises and he’d had to not laugh at them so he didn’t inhale the acidic juice into his lungs.

Now it was just habit after shore to munch on one as he looked through listings for their next possible score.

He sat at one of the tables at the far end of the mess and made himself comfortable, scrolling on his holopad as he worked, making notes and setting aside possible jobs for the next few months. It was quiet, save for the occasional noises the _Elector_ made, and the far off movement of doors as people occasionally moved where they were laid out.

Eventually, he heard someone shuffling into the mess again, and without looking up gave a grunt of acknowledgement.

A minute or so later, and there was a _thunk_ ! against the table in front of him, and he looked up. He was a little surprised to see that it was Pete. Usually, the kid tried to avoid coming in as long as possible, but  he guessed leave a little different. By now, he was pretty used to the cycle of how life on the _Elector_ usually went. He’d had years to, after all.

This morning, though, Pete looked thoughtful. That could either mean he was about to ask some sort of profound question beyond Kraglin’s ability to answer, or he was plotting something.  More and more recently, they’d been plots, and they were starting to veer into territory that rubbed Kraglin entirely the wrong way.

After a few minutes, Pete looked up at him, still with the thoughtful look on his face. “Hey, Kraglin, can I ask you something?”

He looked up from his holopad, turning the screen off. “Sure, Pete.”

“What were you speaking in last night?”

Kraglin nearly inhaled a chunk of fruit. It took him a minute to cough and then swallow it, before he gave Pete a bewildered look. “I _what_.”

Pete didn’t seem to hear him, still with that look on that face, and started talking. “I know that there’s a lot of languages in our translators- I know Terran is one of them, which is weird because of the world don’t-go-there thing. A lot of the crew speak Xandarian anyway, because you taught me how to write it too, which means it’s easier to pick up on who’s actually using it. There’s plenty of other ones like that too.”

It’s about that point in Pete’s long tangent that he realizes what the kid is on about. He can remember most of last night fairly clearly, and it hits him with clarity that Pete heard him speaking in _Hraxian_ . Their table had only been himself, Yondu, Tullk, and the kid. Kraglin knows he has a tendency to use his own language when he’s around just his packmates, because for one, he trusts them, and two, they all have Hraxian in their translators from their days running with the _Starhawk_.

He’d never actually _taught_ it to anyone else… well, not besides Yondu, and that had just been some curses and stupid jokes mixed into showing him how to figure out Centaurian enough that the boss could do it by himself. That was years ago now, although he remembers that night pretty clearly.

Most he’d done was years back when he showed Peter the exact writing for the patch job on the _Molly_ ’s wings.

Well shit. He hasn’t had one of those “You aren’t Xandarian” moments since he was nearly murdered. Maybe that’s why his heart suddenly feels like it’s beating so fast he can’t actually feel it, and why he’s been staring into the middle distance for about a minute.

“- and then I remembered when you and I painted the _Mollymauk_ , and I’ve never seen that writing again. Just on your ship.” Oh, right, Pete was still talking. “So I was wondering… what language they are? I’m assuming it's the same one, just the two forms and all.”

Kraglin almost frowns, and the sudden twinges of panic suddenly just… dissipate. Pete hasn’t actually _asked_ why he knows it, or if it’s his language, he just asked what it was.

“Uh… It’s Hraxian.” He answers after a minute of debate.

“Hraxian?” Pete frowns a little. “Never heard of that before. Where’s that?

Kraglin sucks in a breath between his teeth and takes another _crunch_ of the acid-fruit - and Pete winces when he does - before he replies. “Hrax. It’s outta the way in a back corner of the Nova Empire an’ all that. Not space-faring.” He tries to say it clinically, and not like a man who just almost felt his heart stop over a question about the language he was born into.

“Oh. So, why do _you_ know it if they aren’t space-faring? I mean, you do know a lot of languages, but that seems a little unnecessary.”

… Was Pete actually that dense. Kraglin had been fairly sure that mentioning that it was an out-of-the-way-backwater had made it pretty obvious he knew more than he was sayin’. Or did Peter think he was actually some sort of secret scholar?

So he settles for the same stare and tone he’d used when Pete was younger and questioning how he knew things about the _Elector_ . “Gee, Pete, I think knowing your own damn birth language is pretty important if you want to get by. Why do _you_ know Terran?” To punctuate, he takes another large bite of the fruit and slowly chews.

It takes longer than Kraglin is happy with as first mate and technically one of Pete’s hypothetical space parents for the kid to suss out the meaning in that.

“You- you’re from Hrax?”

He makes a dismissive noise and glances back at his pad, feeling the awkward twinges of panic creeping up his spine again. “‘Yup. Born and partially raised.”

There’s a minute of silence, which feels extremely uncomfortable, before Pete quietly asks, “Did you… were you taken away from Hrax?”

Kraglin winces a little at that. Granted, they haven’t had any rows about how Pete ended up on the _Elector_ in a while, and generally the kid seems pretty alright with it, that doesn’t mean it's comfortable to have come up. But he has to answer him, and it takes him a minute to even think that far back. Kraglin doesn’t think a lot about Hrax, or his life before he got picked up by Stakar. “Nah. Got arrested by the Nova… huh, can’t remember exactly when. Old enough to have all my teeth then.”

That doesn’t seem to reassure Pete, so he rolls his eyes and says, “I have three rows of those, by the way.” Granted, in terms of age comparisons, general full rupture age for Hraxians _is_ probably about how old Pete was when they nabbed him, but Pete doesn’t know that and he’ll never figure it out. All the encyclopedia ‘o the galaxy Nova style still says is that they’re dangerous pests, and well, Pete already knows that.  

Thankfully, Pete takes the bait. “Wait, _three_? You only have one.”

Kraglin grins at him and then takes a second to rub at his jaw muscles, easing them a bit and letting the other two rows rise up a little. It’s kind-of painful when he’s not hyped up on adrenaline or in a fight, but so long as it keeps Peter thinking this is cool and not weird or scary, then he can deal with the soreness later.

Then he flashes Pete his teeth and tears the rest of the acidfruit in half with them, and swallows both chunks. He flourishes his now empty hands, grinning again with flecks of pulp wedged in between the rows. “Ta-da. Or whatever that is.”

“That’s- so fucking _cool_ !” And Pete starts in on a tangent about is that why he can eat anything, how strong are his teeth, who else knows, what exactly is written on the _Mollymauk_ ’s trim, and about fifty other questions that are way too rapidfire for him to actually answer them.

That’s alright though. Kraglin is happy to let him burn himself out, and then he’ll impress on him that he can’t tell _anyone_ about this, because he’s technically considered an invasive species or whatever exact terminology it is, and that it’s dangerous to his health and the health of everyone around him when people know that aren’t in his small circle of close friends.

And then he’ll teach Pete a few cusses. Just for the hell of it.

\---

Probably half a standard century, and things are getting tense on the _Elector._

Kraglin knows the big one is coming. He's put down enough small ones to know. Soothed enough brief tensions, tossed enough possible ringleaders outta the airlock and on to one man suicide runs. Spent enough time with what rookies they have playing nice and drawing their loyalties in to him and the other command crew alongside, because if there's one thing the crew still respects, its that if you want _anything_ done, you go through the first mate.

Granted, he’s getting a little bit annoyed that they’re down to so few old crew that some of the fresher blood has forgotten that also means _literally_ and _that_ literally _is impossible_ , but Kraglin makes sure to make a bit of a show of himself on jobs and that quiets pretty fast.

He has not fought for decades to hold onto his position and his chosen few to be offed by some idiots he had to stop from accidentally gassing them all with cleaning supplies or setting off an M-Ships laser batteries _inside the_ Elector. At least the previous internal conflicts had some small degree of actually thought. The disputes they have now make him want to tear out what short hair he has.

He knows that this whole thing with Pete is the hill Yondu’s chosen to go down on, and there's nothing he can do about that.

Some part of him, under his surface frustration with them both and the stress that arises from essentially _being_ the captain now what with Yondu being partially checked out, and the rising tension in the air that sets his teeth to grating, respects that. Pete is, regardless of everything else he is, still a member of his pack. He might be beyond pissed at him right now, but he can still remember his smell.

A deeper part of him is fucking terrified because he doesn't know if when it comes down to it, he can protect what he has left. Or if Yondu still cares about the rest of him. Horuz has already gone adrift.

The _Warbird_ going down in flames- taste of ozone and charred plasma relays and smoke _everywhere_ \- and not getting replaced had pretty much told him that they were headed over a cliff.

He and Tullk have been tag teaming the lower crew for a couple months now, dogearing the files of people they're worried about. There’s a few names on that list that they’ve decided are actual possible threats to overall morale and possibly even the command structure itself, and of those, one is tied in with all the others. (Horuz isn’t on that list, but only because Tullk insists that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t leave them. Kraglin… Kraglin isn’t sure so more, but it’s _Tullk_ who insists, so he lets it go. And doesn’t stab Horuz for near-insubordination.)  

Turns out, that doesn't matter, because when the big one comes, Kraglin is the one who unleashes it.

 

He stands, adrift and lost in a sea of people who don't belong to him or he to them, in a state of shock caused by his own fool mistake.

That mistake had gotten pretty much everyone he cared about killed.

He doesn’t think the smell of burning yaka and circuits is ever gonna leave his mouth, or the sight of Tullk out _there._

He could cut and run. First thing he'd done when the _Elector_ had gone into a drunk mess after what happened was grab the emergency bags outta his and the captain’s rooms and toss them in the _Mollymauk._

The _Elector_ has two bays for M-Ships, and both are mostly empty still following the whole Xandar shitshow. He'd moved her into the smaller, less used bay in the back of the ship so he had some sort of escape when he got to wanting to pull out his own teeth.

He's spent a lot of time down there the last few weeks. It hasn’t been the majority of his time by any means; that’d been dedicated to working two full shifts to pull up the command slack and keep an eye on the crew, and then half of his downtime was down on the _Molly’_ . He knew that Tullk- who is _gone now_ , and Kraglin is _reeling_ \- had been worried about him, because he was pushing about six hours of sleep or less, but he’d needed some sort of outlet.

So he could just take her and run. With the _Warbird_ and the _Milano_ both gone- destroyed, actually, the _Warbird_ on Xandar and the _Milano_ a few thousand miles behind them- the _Mollymauk_ is the best M-Ship left. It’s always been a point of pride that the only M-Ship that’s probably faster is still Martinex’s nightmare of one.

But he can’t do that. _Yondu_ is still here. Running is cowardly, and un-Hraxian, and he’s been un-Hraxian today enough for the entire rest of his flarkin’ life. And whatever comes after, too- he harbors no doubts in his gut that whatever he’s done guarantees he’s gonna find something bad.

So he goes back to the Cap’ns room to find the missing piece of the emergency kit.

 

He sits in one of the bridge chairs on the _Quadrant_ and eats the first thing he's had since before Berhert, and pretends it's a punishment. It's easier to say that he got left behind with the ship because Yondu doesn't trust him to fight Ego, didn’t trust him to not stab him in the back again.

It's easier than knowing the reason he got left is because he's the only one Yondu trusts to watch their only way out. He could've left Rocket, but regardless of whatever comradery the Cap’n and furry annoyance had struck up in that cell, he'd left Kraglin.

They hadn’t really spoken before the two remaining Guardians and Yondu had left for the surface. Kraglin had known if he opened his mouth, it’d be to spew apologies and beg Yondu not to go. He had no idea what Yondu would’ve said.

As it was, they’d just exchanged a few looks and Yondu had dug into the emergency bag Kraglin had saved from the _Elector_ and handed him the Zune.

That’d been as a good as a conversation, really.

He takes another spoonful of soup and turns the music slightly louder through the comms.

They're a pretty matched set now, the three remaining members of the exiled ravagers. They're all on multiple Nova watchlists, not just for their crimes either.

If Nova ever found out what _exactly_ he was, he'd get shot full of _aconifrox_ faster than prison docs could be made.

Pete technically wasn't supposed to be off Terra neither. The whole “Terrans aren't space faring and their instinct on how to deal with ones that are is immediate and indiscriminate attack” thing and all. Nova hadn't killed him, but that didn't mean they liked his heritage much. And that was _without_ the jackass a few hundred meters below.

He was pretty sure they just liked him now because of the whole thing with the orb. Nova choose to be noble at the _weirdest_ flarking times.

And Yondu, well, Yondu is technically endangered. If he weren't a Ravager, he'd probably be hounded by them to stay nice and quiet somewhere so Centaurians didn't go extinct.

The Ravagers are just sort of like that. He's know both in and through his years wearing the flame a lot of people that weren't quite your average galactic citizen. Sure, there were plenty of Xandarians, Krylorians, whatever other 15-page-Nova-encyclopedia-entry species you could name, but there were plenty of people that'd be the only one you'd ever seen.

Marty, Charlie, Krugar and Mainframe...

Hell, he's almost certain Stakar and Aleta aren't whatever their docs claim.

He's mulling this all over when the Sovereign suddenly choose to appear.

Well _shit._

 

Kraglin decides after that day that he hates the cold. He hadn’t really disliked it even after he was nearly murdered, just disliked that block of freezers.

But after today…

He can’t stand it.

 

Seeing Stakar again after twenty years feels a lot like he imagines having all his teeth tore out and _then_ Orloni Killer blasted through his circulatory functions would. When the Admiral says hello to Pete for the first time in the kid’s life, Kraglin hangs back almost around the blast door housing on the other side of the room.

One part of him, a part that's a memory of an asteroid take over and hours of maintenance on M-Ships and a honorable transfer to a new clan, wants to go to the Admiral for the brief comfort being near him would allow. He's probably the closest thing he's ever had to a father or mentor. He can already tell at this distance that he smells the same, minus the grief-tang drifting strong through the room.

(Instinct says to go over and to try and comfort, lick very sore and infected open wounds together.)

Another part, a part that definitely still remembers the exile like it was yesterday and everything those few words from Stakar had done after, wants to march over and yell at him. Wants to blame him for this whole mess.

(They'd been _left_ , says instinct, you didn't just leave _family_ to die-)

But the biggest part of him, the part that goes down to his core and soul and quickly beating heart says _stay back_ , because Kraglin got Yondu killed. Stakar didn't start the mutiny, didn't make sure everything on the _Quadrant_ was in order before the _already insanely risky rescue mission against a Celestial_.

Hadn’t had anything to do with Ego in the first place. Stakar _wouldn’t_ have.

If Kraglin thinks of the Admiral as close to a father or mentor, he absolutely was for Yondu, and if he knows anything about the Admiral or about that family line, it's that you _don't fuck around with their sons_.

He knows he'll have to come out eventually. He did start a mutiny, and Yondu hadn't lived long enough to exactly tell him how much trouble he was in for it, even if the man hadn't whistled him through. Exiled or not, Admiral is still authority to him.

He should probably give him the arrow too, all things considered, but he's going to hang onto it for as long as he can.

He knows he's selfish. The Zune had been Pete’s anyway, but Pete had given _him_ the arrow.

Technically, he _is_ still exiled too. Colors were for Yondu, and he was dead. Kraglin is the last of their clan now that Pete’s firmly planted the name Starlord with the Guardians, and he and Stakar had never met proper anyway. So he should stay back here anyway. Just because they came and flew colors for Yondu doesn't mean they want anything to do with anyone else from the 99th.

His near-hiding lasts another ten minutes, listening in without outright eavesdropping before Stakar asks what happened to the _Elector_ and the rest of the crew.

He's trying to figure out how much Rocket actually told him when he apparently commed him when Pete goes and _points Kraglin out_ , saying something about everyone else being gone in a mutiny.

He spends a second deciding if Pete is deliberately not telling Stakar _how_ it got started, or if he genuinely doesn't know because that rodent is _sadistic_ and manages to mutter half a prayer that Pete isn't too scarred by whatever Stakar is going to do to him when the Admiral crosses the space and hauls Kraglin into the full light.

He'd really hate for Pete’s first encounter with his space-pirate-grandfather to end with trauma because the Admiral goes and splatters acidic blue everywhere.

(Kraglin's decided he's alright with the whole dying bit, he'd just like not to make Pete’s already pretty shit day any worse by having another family member murdered, even if it's just.)

To his surprise, though, Stakar doesn't immediately yell in his face or punch him, just holds him by the shoulders at arms-length and looks him over like he's checking for injuries.

_Now_ Kraglin is just confused. He'd been expecting to get reamed out or executed. Both really, probably in that order. Not…

Not checked over like Stakar was _worried_.

Finally, Stakar seems satisfied, and lets go. His eyes trace over the arrow-holster strapped onto the leg of his leathers and he seems relieved by that too.

Kraglin can't help it by this point, he's confused and still more than a little scared, and the _relief_ scent mixed in with the grief is giving him whiplash. “A-Admiral? Sir?”

Stakar gives him a small, gruff smile and says in a strained, gravelly voice, “Glad to see you made it.”

At some point in the last few minutes Pete had snuck out and herded the Guardians off and away to give the two Ravagers privacy.

Kraglin attempts to explain the mutiny, Berhert, _what he'd said and why it was all his fault_ , but Stakar only listens and then tells him that it was bound to happen one way or another, and that if Kraglin _hadn't_ started it, or had spent the post-Xandar slump getting into the graces of lower crew and slowly picking up more and more of the slack from Yondu, then he'd have been out the airlock with the rest of command.

And _then_ how would any of them made it to Berhert and stopped a second galaxy conquest?

Kraglin knows he has a point, but the wounds are still fresh and weeping, and everything he knows and feels as a Hraxian disagrees. So he just gives the sort of assent he did when he knew whatever Yondu was planning was stupid but inevitable so it was better to agree and stand by for damage control.

Stakar gives him a Knowing look, but he doesn’t say anything.

That's not where the Admiral stops though.

Stakar offers to let him come back. Kraglin thinks he has a heart attack right then and there. But he declines, because much as he does still respect Stakar, there is a part that still resents him, and a much bigger part that resents himself.

Besides that, he's one of the oldest Ravagers out there now, and he thinks he's too old to go around getting to know new people and he doesn't really know how to not be the man he's been since Stakar first released him from the _Starhawk_ to follow Yondu into the unknown. He'd feel caged and trapped and surrounded by people he couldn't trust and _absolutely should not trust him, because he is a mutineer now._

So he declines, and stays on the _Quadrant_ with the _Mollymauk,_ Pete, and the weird assortment of endangered and rare crewmates he's picked up for his own crew.

Ravagers really are just _like_ that.

\---

Kraglin is fifty-four years old and he is _tired_.

He knows that he’s fifty-four, because as soon as his head stopped aching like he had a spike of M-Ship sharpnel jammed into his skull-actually, it was yaka, and it hurt just as flarking _bad_ -he’d checked his medical records. Punched in the code that opened up his actual real ones and everything. He’d been eighteen when Stakar blasted that prison astroid off the galactic charts.

He’s been in space for thirty-six years of his life. Been a ravager for nearly that long, and according to whatever doc-logic that Stakar’s old medic had used, some near nonsensical string of calculations even to him, his birthday had been a little before everything went straight to hell.

Some celebration.

And he knows he is so, so _very_ tired. He was already starting to get tired _before_ things went to shit, and it’s only gotten heavier since then.

He knows that it’s not his body, not really. He can still hold a knife, tear out a spine with his teeth, and he’s taught himself to whistle properly, even if it still comes out harsher than Yondu’s had ever been.

(The wobble never quite leaves the arrow, though.)

All his body’s done is gone and turned all his hair gray in the course of about a year maximum. But at least it's starting to fuzz around the fin again, which is all he figures he can ask for at this point.

Pete’s doing great. The kid finally seems to have settled into a racket that actually suits ‘em, instead of trailing around stealing ravager jobs or getting himself nearly killed and requiring rescue. He’s even got his own weird little family now.

The old, proud Hraxian in him rumbles a contented noise in the back of his head. Pup is long outta the nest, outta the old pack, and is into a new pack and bloodline and has plenty of years ahead and probably a mate if he can get his head outta his ass. But, he doesn’t need the former First Mate of the equally former Clan Udonta of the Ravagers hanging around. All he’s really done since Pete took over is clean, fix some repairs here and there, and uncover all his old stashes of shit he hid in the walls.

It’s essentially menial work, and some deep part of him finds it slightly degrading, but someone has to do it, and he’s not a first mate to nobody no more.

Something else about Hraxians, something he’d nearly forgotten, was that back in the old days, when the eldest members of a pack got too old, whether it be physical deterioration or increased obsolescence, they would leave and return back to the place they’d grown up, if they’d moved elsewhere. Part of why Hraxians didn’t have a clear lifespan. They just fucked off into the woods on a journey and never came back.

Well, he’s felt pretty obsolete in some ways since that damn orb happened, and since the Guardians saw fit to drag him along with them, he hasn’t really felt like he contributed here either. This isn’t his home. His home is out there, between the stars somewhere.

He’s pretty sure that if he went looking for it, he’d get his ass kicked by at least one of several people, living and dead.

So Hrax’ll do.

 

It’s laughably easy to sneak away from the Guardians. Kraglin almost stays so he can cuff Pete’s ears and give him a talking to about keeping tabs on folks and watching so your shit isn’t stolen.

They’ve docked the _Quadrant_ somewhere for resupply, and Kraglin makes some half-assed excuse about moving the _Molly’_ out of the one remaining M-Ship bay for some repairs. Quill doesn’t question it, just gives a doe-eyed sympathetic look that says the loss of the _Milano_ is still fresh, and lets him berth her at the same dock.

After that it’s a simple task to snag the emergency bag under his cot, toss it in the _Molly’_ , say something about going into the sleazier area of the junktown they’re at to see if he can’t find an old contact, and sneak back once the Guardians are well and gone.

He makes sure though to leave enough of his reclaimed caches behind on Pete’s new desk-somehow not as much of a mess as Yondu’s had been, thank flark the kid actually listened to him on _something_ -to keep him and the Guardians from keeling over and dying within a week should their supply run somehow go wrong.

Kraglin stands by the _Quadrant_ for a moment, trying to think of something to say. He may have already left most of his life behind, but this… this is different. This is the final acceptance that it’s all over and he has to either sink or swim. His throat feels dry and he tries to swallow past it, before giving the metal a rough pat.

The words will always weigh on him, but he knows he’ll never get them all out. Gamora had called it “survivor's guilt”, and given him an uncomfortably familiar look. Kraglin decided to call it staying tough, because the alternative was shattering.

Hraxians _did not_ shatter.

It’s about a month, even with enough jumps to make him near dizzy-but never as many as Rocket had pulled, because that was _flarking insane_ and had probably been responsible for about a third of his gray hairs-and he spends it weaving the yaka arrow around in loose, semi-perfect loops, making instant soup, and sleeping in a makeshift nest in his chair.

He keeps Pete’s music going the whole time.

 

Hrax looks just about as shitty as when he left it, except there was now apparently a Nova station in orbit, which was a little odd. Maybe it had been there before and he just hadn’t ever noticed, which would’ve been easy given you couldn’t see the stars any time of year or day for the smog.

It’s still laughably easy to sneak by it and land the _Mollymauk_ by one of the old abandoned pits. The Nova clearly weren’t expecting anyone besides desperate freighters to _want_ to come to Hrax. Getting out again might be a problem, but given that he only plans to maintain the _Molly_ , not fly her, this isn’t really a concern.

Not anymore.

Inhaling the Hraxian smog weighs him down in a way that he hasn’t felt since he left, like he can simultaneously finally _breathe_ and that he might choke on it. Everything smells _painfully_ familiar for a place he hasn’t seen in near over forty years. It’s sure as fuck not home, but it is one of the first things he learned to pick apart.

It’s only after he’s packed what possessions he’d taken from his bag and made sure that the M-Ship was fully secured and hidden in an old still standing mill that he realized he didn’t really have a plan for what he was going to do when he got here.

Sure, the Hraxian way would be to trace his way back to his roots, but there’s no guarantee that his remaining family is alive, let alone still in that shithole of a block.

He doesn’t really have any other options, though.

So he walks.

 

Kraglin is fifty-four years, a couple months, and still _very_ tired when he finally reaches the sector where he’d grown up. Remarkably, it looks the same. It’s still all grungy and gray and rather disgusting, which he feels a new appreciation for having been a Ravager. Sure, he’d never claim that they were clean, especially not some of the lower crew, but there’d been a certain charm to that.

This was just Hrax.

One thing that he does know is different is there are far more painted and stuck up sheets of thin Nova-issue papers with orders to find rebels. He guesses that the resistances are still going, and with all the other shit that’s happened in the galaxy in the last few years, Nova must finally be getting sick of it.

He's come slightly in and then retreated back to his M-Ship plenty of times by now, leaving a route for him to remember. Might've had a scent to it if it weren't for the overwhelming Nova trash and the number of Hraxians crawling around.

He'd like to say that he keeps going back because he's thinking of going back out to space. Hrax is _shit_ , which he'd known.

But he also knows he's a flarking coward. And still too tired to force himself to take the controls.

The only way out now, is through the grime-and-rust maze of eroding metal.

 

Kraglin is fifty-four years old when he knocks on the door of his first home out of sheer morbid curiosity, and is greeted by the hunched figure of his _Leanar._ For a second, he's struck with absolute certainty that he is dead, that the _Mollymauk_ had gone up in a spectacular spray of flame and sparks like the _Warbird_ had, or that he's just died of massive organ failure and that was the end of going off into the woods to die.

At least until his _Leanar_ sucker punches him in the jaw and his vision goes blue out of shock and he can taste acidic blood welling up around his teeth.

“And where the hell have _you_ been.”

Kraglin is _reeling_.

He means to say something like “busy” or “working”, because he doesn’t want to talk about being a ravager in plain view, because regardless of if the average citizen of Hrax won’t know what that means and he can’t _see_ any Nova, he doesn’t want to just divulge his whole fucking life story right here on his _Leanar_ ’s doorstep.

But what comes out is-

“How are you still alive?”

He gets a light shove for that, and a snapped reply with a click of teeth. “Someone had to keep that fool boy from getting himself ate.”

Kraglin is beginning to have serious questions about Hraxian longevity. Maybe they were more often simply bored at behest of the universe, lest they live forever and infest the whole galaxy.

He then realizes what she said. “Jae’s alive?”

She nods, clicking her teeth together again. “No thanks to his scheming, but last I saw him he was.”

Something in Kraglin is beginning to slowly crumble at, well, _everything_ . He’s standing here, at the door of the shitty little apartment block he grew up in, his _Leanar_ is still somehow alive, Jae is somehow alive- he hates to admit that he really thought about them in years- he’s on Hrax, proper air in his lungs, and he’s actually talking in his born language with someone who is talking it back to him. For some reason the language bit is what gets to him, and he clamps his jaw shut to avoid crying.

Some part of him is furious and rears up like a fiery beast, _how is_ this _the thing that breaks you_ , oathbreaker, pack-betrayer-

But the rest of him knows that he's been a cracking M-Ship screen for a while, fucked up as the _Warbird_ had been on Xandar, and that this is just the final Kree blast to break it free.

He hasn’t ever _cried_ . Hraxians only weep to purge their eyes of contaminants. Pete had called it crocodile tears once, which Kraglin absolutely did not understand, because he’d said it like an insult and Kraglin’s were just a biological process. Sure, sometimes they got wetter with emotion, but some Nova doc he’d read once said you _did_ cry out chemical markers of emotion. So there.

 

_Lenar_ tells him where to look for his idiot younger brother, and after a week, the directions lead Kraglin to a warehouse that reminds me a _lot_ of something from when he was a kid. He avoids whatever security measures there are to get inside- just because he isn’t a Ravager anymore doesn’t mean he doesn’t know _how_ to do things.

Kraglin had been considering walking up to Jae and just saying hello, but that plan goes right out the window when he gets into where _Leanar_ said he'd be.

Everyone in here is wearing what looks to be scrapped together variants on the same uniform. Jae, or at least who he figures is Jae based on the couple of holos _Leanar_ showed him, seems to have the most intricate of them.

And they all seem to have a symbol suspiciously close to the one he's seen sprayed up everywhere.

So he forgoes the greeting, adjusts his position a bit, draws his biggest knife-

And sends it hurtling to _thunk_ into the wall right by Jae’s ear.

Predictably, this gets about fifteen various guns pointed at him and he sighs and raises his hands and glares at Jae, who is now staring at him with wide eyes, mouth agape.

It reminds him of the last look he'd seen on Jae some thirty-six years back.

And speaking of-

“Thought I told you to run and stay out if it or I'd knock out your teeth, you brat.”

Jae just stares, and finally blubbers out something that he pieces together as, “You’re _alive_.”

Kraglin has no desire to go over that fact again, least of all in a crowded underground bar full of _revolutionaries still pointing weapons at him_. “Nah, Jae, I’m dead.” He drawls. “You’ll wake up tomorrow and smell a faint aroma around your room, a memory…”

Kraglin definitely wasn’t basing that on his night terrors, nope, definitely not.

When Jae finally did move, it was to give him a weak shove that barely made Kraglin sway, eyes watery and his voice crackling, “You _ass,_ I thought you were _dead_ , I thought I’d _killed_ you-”

Aw, hell, his brother is crying now.

Kraglin isn’t in practice with people crying on him, or really near him. Last time Peter had cried on him was at over ten years ago now. And his brother is what, only three years younger than he is? Which is a fucking weird thought, they’re both over fifty now. How is Jae alive.

How is _he_ alive?

(And _why_.)

But it’s starting to get uncomfortable, so Kraglin sighs and reaches forwards to pull Jae’s forehead flush with his and he says, “C’mon, no scenes.”

Jae gives a hitching, near hysterical laugh. “No scenes? This from the guy who shows up in my supposedly-secret rebel headquarters, that’s actually my dead older brother I haven’t seen since I was ten years old and who has some sort of red something in his head? Really?”

Kraglin huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Really."

 

About two weeks after Kraglin sees Jae, their _Lenar_ dies. This brings back into the forefront of his mind his whole debate on how long Hraxians live and why, though he suspects that with him back on this smog-filled planet and therefore able to keep an eye on Jae again, _Lenar_ was just as tired as he was. He doesn’t begrudge her that, but he does harbor an annoyance towards Jae for the whole thing.

This may be his birthplace, but it still isn’t home. He wasn’t really expecting to find anything here other than a place to hole up for a while and to maybe die if his body decided it was going to do that. Thus far, it seems to believe in continuing on. He’s even regrown his mohawk, although it’s thinner than it used to be and there’s barely any tint of brown left in it.

They handle _Lenar_ ’s burial rites and get rid of the shitty apartment they grew up in, because Jae apparently lives either in the series of places that the rebels have their strongholds, or with other rebels, and Kraglin has been only coming out to the sector for a few days each week and spends the rest of his time back at the _Mollymauk_.

This time is divided between cleaning up the immediate area around the M-Ship, because if something falls on her or scratches the paint, he’s going to be _pissed_. It’s not like has an immediate access to major repair tools. Plus, if he’s going to be staying here, then it needs to be less… full of random shit. Kraglin had gotten very used to his mostly empty and orderly space, thank-you-very-much.

He gets comms from Pete. He ignores them and then starts deleting them when his inbox gets too full. He’d made sure to disable any of the tracking arrays on the _Molly’_ , although without the _Elector_ , most of them were already obsolete. Eventually, he tells himself, he’ll actually read one or answer when Pete tries to actually call him.

Eventually doesn’t come, though, not yet, before Pete starts to slow down. He feels a weird pit in his gut when he realizes, which he attributes to eating something that disagreed with him. Lying to himself about Hraxian’s degrading with age is easier than trying to wade through the mire of emotions he’s been trying to outrun since Berhert.

Gamora had probably been right about him.

He can still remember all of their smells. Both the Guardians and Stakar. Marty never really _had_ a smell, so he doesn’t count the _Starhawk_ ’s first mate.

So he sits around on the _Molly_ ’, cleans up the space around the mill when he finishes inside, and chugs through the months of soup rations he’d pulled out of his stashes. It all gets…

Well, boring. Now he’s tired and frustrated. Before, when he got bored, he had options, things to do, work even. He didn’t really mind being busy, except when it came at the expense of _everything he cared about_.

And then, one day, Jae manages to find his hiding place, and basically begs him to join up with the rebellion. They’re so close, his little brother claims, and with Kraglin’s knowledge from actually being off-world and interacting with the Nova in more situations- and even if Kraglin still refuses to tell him _what_ exactly he was doing out there- his obvious skillset, they can make it all the way.

His first instinct, one that’s still rather pissed that Jae didn’t take his _assumed dying request_ seriously, and that doesn’t really give a shit about Hrax if he’s honest, says to tell Jae to fuck off and leave him alone.

The second instinct says, wait, hold on, this could at least be interesting. Something to do. Maybe, if he’s lucky, he’ll even get himself shot or something and won’t have to deal with being bored when they all inevitably get caught.

So Kraglin sits up and sets his soup bowl aside. He considers. Then he stands with an audible creak and cracks his back, before he looks at Jae.

“Sure. Why the hell not. What do you need me to do.”

 

“How. How is your record keeping _worse_ than what I was doing before.” Kraglin stares at the ‘pad he’s been given.

Now, Kraglin has to admit, he thinks that for being outlaw’s outlaws, most of whom were illiterate or only read and wrote one language, the 99th had good records. Kraglin handled the business, Tullk did the archival work, and the other command crew would handle their own reports. Kraglin technically would handle all of it before it was considered to be finished, but he liked to think that they were pretty decent.

This though.

This is _awful._

There is no coherent naming system for the files, or any form of organization, and some of the documents are composed of such broken Hraxian that Kraglin suddenly feels actually _grateful_ for the text-speech translators that Pete kept trying to use.

Jae doesn’t even have the decency to look apologetic. “We do the necessities.”

“Y’all’ve got the same faction listed _twice._ ” Kraglin pinches his nose. “Okay, alright, I’ll fix this.”

It takes about a standard week, and Kraglin blearly accepts halfway through that regardless of however long it was Hraxians could live, he can’t pull four-day shifts anymore, and tensely sleeps in Jae’s ramshackle bunker.

It’s uncomfortable, because he’s not the only one, and besides being used to sleeping alone- or with a snot-nosed Terran when Pete was young and would pass his biolock after nightmares- it reminds him too much of the piles low crew made to sleep when it was colder on ship.

 

One thing he realizes, and appreciates about Jae, is that Jae never tries to order him.

He’ll suggest things, or just ask if Kraglin can do it, but he never tries to directly tell him to _do_ anything. He doesn’t press or chase Kraglin back to the _Molly_ ’ when it all gets to be too much.

Kraglin wonders when his idiot brother grew up and got smart. But he’s grateful.

The only thing Jae _does_ ask about is the yaka crest, which, fair enough, it’s kinda hard to ignore that. Kraglin tries to give as little detail as possible, and even that feels like _aconifrox_ is in all the chambers of his heart.

But he gets through it, and he shows Jae how the arrow flies, and the k- well, Jae isn’t a kid anymore- slightly-younger-than-him man seems impressed and tells Kraglin that he shouldn’t be surprised that it’s what the crest is for, because everything about him is blades, and a arrow is just a controlled flying blade-wedge after all.

Kraglin can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying after that.

 

Surprisingly, when Kraglin is fifty-five, Jae’s little rebellion finally marchs into the Nova sector and they can officially say Hrax is released.

Sure, Jae had already gotten pretty fair by the time Kraglin had showed up, but it’s still a surprise to him.

They storm the barracks, and Kraglin moves the _Molly’_ outta the pit to do a run at the Nova station- which is soon after abandoned by the Corps and he watches as their last literal-star-ships leave the area through the jumpgate across the system.

For a second, he considers following, but he can’t just leave Jae in the lurch like that.

(He’s not quite ready to go out there. Alone. Kraglin has never been alone in space. Not until he’d come here.)

So he goes back. They’re unfurling their banners over the Nova starblazes and finding their way like smograts into the systems so they can broadcast the news to all of Hrax. They all take over rooms in the main building, which Kraglin doesn’t go into. He’s happy to stay on the _Mollymauk_ , thank you, now that there’s plenty of empty berths to choose from in the small surface dock.

M-Ships don’t _quite_ fit the Nova spots, but Hraxians make due and Kraglin has plenty of experience slightly widening a hole.

He gets a comm about showing up for the broadcast, and denies it. He doesn’t want his mug plastered all over Hrax. He doesn’t want to be met by people in the streets.

A week goes by, and things are pretty much like they were before he’d joined Jae. Then he gets another comm about the new heads all coming together to start working on their post-rebellion plans.

Kraglin reluctantly agrees to be there with Jae for their meeting. It means that he goes up to his room for the first and only time, and stands under the industrial spigot and is nearly bowled over with water when he goes to turn it on.

The water, like everything else on Hrax, isn’t up to most standards. It scales to his skin, leaving itchy patches of different minerals. He sort of looks like a fish by the time he’s decided that he’s done, and it takes him twice as long as it did to wash to get it all out of his hair.

He has an uncomfortable staring match with the clothes on his bed.

They smell _wrong_ . They look _wrong_.

The last, and _only_ time he’d found a pile of clothes on his bed was some thirty years ago, and it was the leathers he’s peeled out of and carefully left on a chair near the door. They’d been made for him by one of three people he thinks he’s ever truly _loved_ \- and ugh, how’s that for sentiment, he’d get cuffed for just thinking that- and these…

These are half-reclaimed military, half-haphazardly stitched with the colors Jae’d picked out for the rebranding of Hrax, and they ain’t any bit of them leather. When he forces himself to pull them on, they itch against his skin and pull on his scars.

The yaka does _not_ look good with them.

Kraglin doesn’t think his scars and tattoos look good with them either, but at least that’s less jarring. He doesn’t stand right for it either. Nova expects a certain posture, and it’s not one that thirty-some years of being a Ravager’s first mate leave with you.

 

About an hour later, he finds out that Jae is now “Minister Jaeglin” or something like that, and apparently, the stitching on Kraglin’s uniform makes him “Baymaster Kraglin”. Turns out, Jae has put him in charge of managing their efforts to build their own ships. And then managing them.

He cuffs Jae for that, but his brother just laughs.

 

It’s about a year and a half since he bailed on the Guardians and ran for all the _Molly_ ’s engines are worth when he finally gets caught.

He’d been working on some of the newer ships, inspecting the assemblies to make sure that nothing was going to explode. They’ve gotten better overall at manufacturing, but that doesn’t mean anything that comes into his hangar isn’t getting sweeped. He’s the baymaster- and he think’s he’ll finally getting used to that title, even if he still is slightly frustrated with Jae for tricking him into it- so he’s going to make sure everything is proper in his sphere of control.

And he also would rather not have to take out someone’s spine if some idiot connects the wrong relays and the _Molly’_ is damaged in the ensuing explosion when it gets used for the first time.

So, he’s on his back on a rolling palette, judging if everything in the panel he’s unbolted is in order, when someone rings their knuckles on the metal. It is only a year of practice that keeps him from jolting in shock and slamming the implant against the ship above him. That doesn’t stop him from grumbling, though, as he emerges from under the ship to eye the aide who has disturbed him.

They look nervous. Which is good- Kraglin had resolved to never get friendly with people he worked with again. Felt wrong and made his skin itch in the worst kinds of ways. It’s also assisted in building his image as anti-social and callous. People mostly leave him to his own devices these days.

“What is it?” Kraglin asks, wiping off his hands on his pants. Jae had finally gotten him to stop wearing his Ravager leathers, if only for the sake of presenting a unified image and the fact that they were starting to fall apart a little. Kraglin definitely didn’t want to loose them, and seeing as he didn’t have access to someone who could fix them- as that person was _dead_ \- he had reluctantly agreed. The fabric is nothing like his leathers, but at least it hides grease stains.

“You asked to be notified whenever larger ships came in. One’s here now.” They say, gesturing over their shoulder towards the wide open bay doors.

Rebuilding- or rather _breaking down_ \- Hrax has been an interesting process. They started by tearing out all of the Nova structures that they didn’t see as necessary and tossing them into one of the pits they designated the “won’t bother rehabbing” pit. It was time consuming, and as Hrax was basically overbuilt with bare inches of space, even in abandoned areas, they’d had to throw a lot into the pit to have enough space for Kraglin to start pulling schematics for what was now the shipyards.

The one good thing that they could agree on about the Nova having taken over was that now that they were taking it all back, there were plenty of Hraxians who could build if you just gave them directions. Most of the former miners had happily joined up with the new government soon as they started throwing the Nova down.

The first priorities were to build the shipyards and then to tear up enough of the former Nova barracks to start efforts at terraforming parts of the planet back. Both of these were to the end of making Hrax defensible when the Nova eventually returned. Kraglin suspected they had more time than Jae thought, but he wasn’t going to tell him that.

There was, after all, still hints of a war on and rumors of more of the Infinity Stones being uncovered.

(Part of the reason he never called Pete back was because _fuck that, one was enough thank you, he’d rather not be slaughtered over a stupid remnant of the universe’s foundation. His interactions with an Elder and a Celestial had been more than enough without the Orb, and then some._ )

So when he follows their gesture and walks about ten feet forwards for a better view, his heart almost stops. Because sitting there, getting situated in one of the larger and flatter areas they mostly use for moving ships from the yards to the small bays, is the _Starhawk_.

Kraglin thinks the blood may have all drained from his head, because for a second he sees a few spots in his vision and the only coherent thought he has is that the _Starhawk_ must barely fit there, because it’s a _massive_ flagship. How’d they even fit it?

The second coherent thought is to whirl around and make a fucking run for it. He can’t hide in the _Molly’_ , which is where he usually holes up when he sleeps, because try as Jae might to get him to stay in the room he’s technically assigned to, Kraglin refuses to do so. But they’ll meet Jae, because Jae goes out and meets _everyone_ , seeing as he is _in-charge of the whole fucking planet now,_ and Jae will tell them where his room is and then where the _Mollymauk_ is housed.

The one place he can think of to go that isn’t just running off into the sectors of still high-rising and grime-slick metal is to the small, controlled room in the old barracks that contains the first of the plants they’re going to try and get to take in Hrax’s lacking-nearly-everything soil.

He can hear the aide behind him calling after him, and he nearly bowls over a few others, but they scramble away and he just keeps running until he gets there. He can’t exactly remember how, as he’d been running on pure feral instinct, but he does. He ends up under a table of acidfruits and pulls his legs up to his chest like he’s a fucking pup, ducking his head so the fin doesn’t go clanging off the table.

Yeah, it’s childish, and sure, last time he’d seen Stakar things had gone okay, but that was _before_ he’d fucked off without so much as a word and before he’d let things sit and fester in the back corner of his mind for well over a year.

He should probably talk to someone about the things in his head, but they don’t exactly have that on Hrax, and he can’t be bothered to use the _Molly’_ to find anywhere that will take a Xandarian with _definite records_ , let alone a Hraxian.

They’d checked, and the Nova still haven’t lifted the ban or changed any of their records. Most that’s changed is a mention of Hrax as a continuous area that will be dealt with in the future.

Anyway, his delicate mental state.

When no one comes in immediately, he slowly emerges back out to look at the rows of plants contained on the tables. Yeah, no one's gonna think to look for him in here. Kraglin’s never been much of a plant person, between his origins on this planet and the life dedicated to living in a moving metal city through the stars.

But these plants are the first steps in saying their final “fuck-you” to Nova. The funny thing is, shitty as Hrax’s soil content is, it turns out it’s always been like that. Hraxian flora is just as hardy and vicious as the fauna.

They’re planning to let them get a little bigger, then they’re going to release them outside into the first “garden” that’s planned. Eventually, the goal is to tear down the abandoned sectors- throwing the refuse into the pit and reusing the rest for ships and to repair the rest of the degraded planet- and start turning the abandoned pits into tiered areas for the plants. If they can get the plants to stick, and then move the wildlife out there, they may have a chance at avoiding going off planet for food for just a little while longer.

None of them are quite sure how or are ready for making contact with anyone else. Kraglin can show them how to be pirates and where to go for smaller amounts of supplies, but this is a planet they’re talking about. They’ll have to worry about it eventually.

But Kraglin won’t, because he’s been very clear that he is only sticking around for the ships. He’s willing to give them what he knows in exchange for being left to his own devices, but he draws the line hard and fast at interplanetary diplomacy. That’s for Jae and his people to worry about. Kraglin considers himself apart from them. He could leave again at any time if he wanted to.

Not that he has, but still. It's the principle.

When he finally goes back to the _Molly’_ , Stakar is there, but it’s just Stakar, and he doesn’t say anything. They just stand and stare out at the stars. Every so often, Stakar gives him one of those knowing looks of his, but they don’t speak.

Eventually, the Admiral leaves, trailing solar dust behind him.

 

He’s been getting… restless again. The same kind of restless that had pulled him home to Hrax, but also different. He isn’t tired anymore. He’s starting to feel more and more like a cornered animal.

Jae prods at him about his past and about taking a bigger position, but in response, Kraglin just looks him in the eyes and bites into the acidfruit he keeps in the _Molly’_. He’s sentimental, so sue him.

He thinks of Stakar and his knowing eyes, and gets a feeling.

 

The second time the _Starhawk_ comes to Hrax, it’s a few weeks later, and there is a second ship alongside her. It’s the _Quadrant_.

This time, Kraglin doesn’t run off as soon as he notices. Instead, he heads down to the docking area, and waits.

He isn’t entirely prepared for Pete to throw himself at him and start going on and on about how Kraglin is an asshole and should’ve called or something because Pete thought he was _dead_ , so on and so forth. He puts up with it, though, because he knows that the brat is right and because deep down he remembers another time that Pete had clung on to him like that.

And if he lightly throws his arms around the kid and apologizes, then who fucking cares. Pete is the last of his pack that he has left. And Kraglin is also something like almost fifty six now and _flark he is_ ancient _he should appeal to whatever Eldar’s are left for some kind of title._

Stakar, being The One Who Knows, does that annoying thing where he looks at Kraglin and then gives a smile.

Jae is looking at him too. He has a very un-Hraxian look of almost sorrow and understanding. He kind of wants to yell at his brother to wipe it off his face.

But he won’t.

At least this time he’s leaving in his own ship, and not the brig of a Nova prison shuttle.

There’s a new _Milano_ , which is now the third one to go by that name, but unlike her predecessors, there are six languages all interwoven in her trim.

 

There were many things that had been lost to time on Hrax. There was the tradition and knowledge of the return into one’s birthplace to await the end, but there was another, forgotten as the forests disappeared.

It was the return to the birthplace to remind one of things forgotten, to reinvigorate. It didn’t guarantee any more years, but it allowed rest and remembrance. Then, they would return to their pack and keep going until the final voyage called to them.

And thus the _Mollymauk_ returned unto the stars once more. 


End file.
